Ben Hecht

“ There is a huge tribe of these readers who grow duller with every idea they encounter, who skim through thousands upon thousands of pages of literature with the same abstraction to be noted in idiots who sit tying countless knots in a piece of string. ”

“ An honest modern author about to play host to his reader, about to step into the vestibule with a hand of welcome and induct his reader into his work, must pause and shudder. There are so many fools reading books. ”

“ For one, it is obvious that the squealing set up by one pack of fools that modern books are erotic has attracted another pack of fools whose major interest in reading is the hope of running across erotic passages.
I have noted that the simpletons who squeal over the obscenity of modern literature and the simpletons who rush to the book stores to buy only obscenity are members of the same lodge. They are both people whose normal stupidity is shocked by any deviation from the platitude in which their souls are buried. ”

“ There is also the modern book publisher. When books are advertised as liberally and profusely as so many two-dollar hats is it any wonder that the same sort of people will buy them? Advertising will sell anything in our Republic. ”

“ The simpleton of today, not content with his simplicity, must read books and masquerade —among other simpletons, of course—as a man or woman of culture. To seem cultured has become, paradoxically, as important in our Republic as to appear intolerant, moralistic and otherwise half-witted and American. ”

“ And there is also the lust for romance and other dream escapes which burns in the hearts of a taboo-ridden people. Your moralist cocainizes himself, as a rule, by prodigious injections of magazine fiction. ”

“ There are relatively few people capable of digesting more than a dozen books in their lifetime. There are even fewer capable of understanding a single imaginative or lively work did they devote their entire energies to the study of it. ”