Ben Hecht Quotes
Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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.
A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him.
The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
Bad writing is not easier than good writing. It's just as hard to make a toilet seat as it is a castle window. Only the view is different.
Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.
The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.
In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.
There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.
Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
I see a lot of fog and a few lights. I like it when life's hidden. It gives you a chance to imagine nice things, nicer than they are.
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.
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.
Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.
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.
That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
Innocent people can get into terrible jams, too. One false move and you're in over your head.
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
