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Ben Hecht Quotes

Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films.

At the age of 16, Hecht ran away to Chicago, where, in his own words, he "haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops". In the 1910s and early 1920s, Hecht became a noted journalist, foreign correspondent, and literary figure. In the 1920s, his co-authored, reporter-themed play, The Front Page, became a Broadway hit.

The Dictionary of Literary Biography – American Screenwriters calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures". Hecht received the first Academy Award for Best Story for Underworld . Many of the screenplays he worked on are now considered classics. He also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach . Film historian Richard Corliss called him "the Hollywood screenwriter", someone who "personified Hollywood itself". In 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed Angels Over Broadway, which was nominated for Best Screenplay. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning.

Hecht became an active Zionist after meeting Peter Bergson. Shortly before the Holocaust began in Germany, he wrote articles and plays about the plight of European Jews, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born in 1946. Of his seventy to ninety screenplays, he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British forces in Palestine and sabotaging British property there , during which time a supply ship to Palestine was named the S. S. Ben Hecht.

According to his autobiography, he never spent more than eight weeks on a script. In 1983, 19 years after his death, Ben Hecht was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. Wikipedia  

✵ 28. February 1894 – 18. April 1964
Ben Hecht photo

Works

Perfidy
Ben Hecht
Perfidy
Ben Hecht
Ben Hecht: 32 quotes2 likes

Famous Ben Hecht Quotes

“A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it.”

Ben Hecht

Books

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

Ben Hecht

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

“I'll tell you a secret. We live in a mad and inspiring world.”

Ben Hecht

“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

Books

“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.”

Ben Hecht

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

“The only place I felt at home was in your heart. You were the only light that didn't go out on me.”

Ben Hecht

Angels Over Broadway (1940)
Screenplays

Ben Hecht Quotes about the world

“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.”

Ben Hecht

Angels Over Broadway (1940)
Screenplays

“The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.”

Ben Hecht book Perfidy

Perfidy
Books

“Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they're the only lights in the world.”

Ben Hecht

Foreign Correspondent (1940)
Screenplays

Ben Hecht Quotes

“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.”

Ben Hecht

Books

“Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product. These were Underworld, The Scoundrel, Wuthering Heights, Viva Villa, Scarface, Specter of the Rose, Actors and Sin, Roman Holiday, Spellbound, Nothing Sacred.”

Ben Hecht

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

“The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.”

Ben Hecht

Books

“The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and, later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status.”

Ben Hecht

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

“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.”

Ben Hecht

Nothing Sacred (1937)
Screenplays

“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.”

Ben Hecht

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

“"It's gonna be just like war!" an editor exults. "That's it! War! You put that in the lead.”

Ben Hecht

'WAR - GANG WAR!'" Scarface (1932)
Screenplays

“You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?”

Ben Hecht book Miracle in the Rain

Miracle in the Rain (1956)
Screenplays

“Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst’s couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the fine novelist.”

Ben Hecht

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

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

Ben Hecht

Books

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

Ben Hecht

Books

“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.”

Ben Hecht

Angels Over Broadway (1940)
Screenplays

“There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.”

Ben Hecht

A Guide for the Bedevilled
Books

“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.”

Ben Hecht

from Let's Make the Hero a MacArthur
Books

“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.”

Ben Hecht

Books

“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

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

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

Ben Hecht

Books

“I was afraid you would think I was bragging.”

Ben Hecht

When asked by his new wife's discomfited parents, "Why didn't you tell us you were a Jew?", Hecht responded
Books

“The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there.”

Ben Hecht

Design for Living (1933)
Screenplays

“How My Egoism Died”

Ben Hecht

from A Child of the Century
Books

“When I come to put down their names, there weren’t many. David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger, Irving Thalberg seem to exhaust the list…Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft.”

Ben Hecht

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959

“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.”

Ben Hecht book Perfidy

Perfidy
Books

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