Ben Hecht quotes

Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, playwright, and novelist, regarded as one of Hollywood's most influential storytellers. His work helped shape the narrative style of early American cinema, earning him multiple Academy Awards. He became renowned for his witty dialogue and prolific contributions to classic films. Here are 54 of his quotes:

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)
People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized. View quote
Ben Hecht
Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away. View quote
Ben Hecht
A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. View quote
Ben Hecht
I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world. View quote
Ben Hecht
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. View quote
Ben Hecht
Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty. View quote
Ben Hecht
The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them. View quote
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. View quote
Ben Hecht
There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age. View quote
Ben Hecht
The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people. (Ben Hecht)
Love is a hole in the heart. View quote
Ben Hecht
In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel. View quote
Ben Hecht
Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director, and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop. View quote
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. View quote
Ben Hecht
Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat. View quote
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. View quote
Ben Hecht
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. View quote
Ben Hecht
The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links. View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
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.' View quote
Ben Hecht
A simple fact entered my head one day and put an end to my revolt against the Deity. It occurred to me that God was not engaged in corrupting the mind of man but in creating it. This may sound like no fact at all, or like the most childish of quibbles. But whatever it is, it brought me a sigh of relief, a slightly bitter sigh. I was relieved because instead of beholding a man as a finished and obviously worthless product, unable to bring sanity into human affairs, I looked on him (in my conversion) as a creature in the making. And lo, I was aware that like my stooped and furry brothers, the apes, I am God's incomplete child. My groping brain, no less than my little toe, is a mechanism in His evolution-busy hands. View quote
Ben Hecht
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. View quote
Ben Hecht