Ben Hecht Quotes

I was afraid you would think I was bragging.

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.

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.

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.

Gibbons is a man full of pain and violence. On this night, there is a Witch's Sabbath in his heart. Storms are blowing his world to bits and great troubles are pounding him on a reef.

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

The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write.

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

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

A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

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