Quotes by Ben Hecht

“Love is a hole in the heart.”

“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.”

“Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.”

“Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety”

“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.”

“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.”

“We looked on the hopheads, crooks and gunsels and on their bawdy ladies as members of a family among whom we were privileged to move. There was no caste system, moral or social, in our manners.”

“The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you cant have both”

“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.”

“Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.”

“In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.”

“In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owners 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.”

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

“I lost my own son (Steven) at 18, five years ago, in a car accident, so I can really sympathize with what the families have gone through.”

“We are helping to make a market of low-income people, but making sure that the market is one these people can participate in, that the costs are affordable. And once theyre online, there is something to do online, a destination where they can go and improve their lives.”

“We are going to make sure that there is high-speed broadband available to everyone, and affordable to people historically kept out of it. It means they have not just access, but can also understand how to buy low-cost, affordable computers.”

“Once youre online and you see its power, you never go back. What we want to make sure of is that the nation has 21st century infrastructure for information for low-income people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I have written a raucous valentine to a poets dream and agony.”