I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.
—Ben Hecht
Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Fame
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.
—Ben Hecht
When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Money
Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Love, Magic
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
—Ben Hecht
In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner’s mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Hollywood
Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Hollywood
Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Time Management
There’s a thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die; their silence.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Death, Dying
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Prejudice
Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them—as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
—Ben Hecht
There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.
—Ben Hecht
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Effort, Trying
I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.
—Ben Hecht
Topics: Vanity
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Raymond Chandler American Novelist
- Joseph Heller American Novelist
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- William Goldman Hollywood Screenwriter
- Truman Capote American Novelist
- William Saroyan American Playwright, Novelist
- Sinclair Lewis American Novelist
- Neil Simon American Playwright
- Sidney Sheldon American Novelist, Screenwriter
- Don DeLillo American Author
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