Ben Hecht Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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
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
In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.

Ben Hecht
Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

Ben Hecht
Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade.

Ben Hecht
"It's gonna be just like war!" an editor exults. "That's it! War! You put that in the lead.

Ben Hecht
The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: 'Who shall be in charge of telling the story.'

Ben Hecht
You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?

Ben Hecht
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.

Ben Hecht
The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there.

Ben Hecht
When I come to put down their names, there weren't many. David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger, Irving Thalberg seem to exhaust the list…Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft.

Ben Hecht
Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley.

Ben Hecht
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.

Ben Hecht
I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.

Ben Hecht
The only place I felt at home was in your heart. You were the only light that didn't go out on me.

Ben Hecht
Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself.

Ben Hecht
Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst's couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the fine novelist.

Ben Hecht
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.

Ben Hecht
The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.

Ben Hecht
There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.

Ben Hecht
H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.

Ben Hecht
Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

Ben Hecht
They're a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep, and laugh all the time - and they're phonies, all of them. And I head the list... their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.

Ben Hecht
There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

Ben Hecht
Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

Ben Hecht
I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies—as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.

Ben Hecht
People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized.

Ben Hecht
Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they're the only lights in the world.

Ben Hecht
The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and, later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status.

Ben Hecht
Go on, Heathcliff, run away. Bring me back the world!

Ben Hecht