The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the recognition and honors given to writers in Hollywood are insincere and superficial.
Ben Hechtβs quote critiques the facade of respect that Hollywood offers to writers, implying that such honors are as flimsy and worthless as tissue-paper cuff links. It reflects a disillusionment with the entertainment industry's treatment of its writers, suggesting that true talent and contribution are often overlooked or undervalued.
In practice
During a seminar on the challenges of writers in the film industry, this quote can highlight the lack of genuine appreciation for their work.
Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer's habit to remember nothing good of himself. I have usually forgotten those who have admired my work, and seldom anyone who disliked it. Obviously, this is because praise is never enough and censure always too much.
Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores
So I think I'll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it's gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it's not the production. It's not the same thing.
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
I think that an industrial process is not like a rubber stamp. Everything has to be put together and, as such, should have its own expression.
What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.
I like so many different kinds of music that I've never allowed myself the limitations of one particular range.
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