Quotes from Ben Hecht

The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.

The German mass murder of the Jews... brought my Jewishness to the surface.

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

In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.

That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.

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.

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

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.

Kindness, tolerance, integrity, modesty, generosity - these are attributes that events permit us. They are our holiday moods, and we are as proud of them as of the fine clothes we have hung away to wear on occasions.

Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less.

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

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.

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.

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.

I have lived in other cities but been inside of only one. I once wore all the windows of Chicago and all its doorways on a key ring. Salons, mansions, alleys, courtrooms, depots, factories, hotels, police cells, the lake front, the rooftops and the sidewalks were my haberdashery.

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

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

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

Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.

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

There is hardly one in three of us who live in the cities who is not sick with unused self.

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.

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.

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...