96 Quotes by 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.