Best 52 quotes of Billy Wilder on MyQuotes

Billy Wilder

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    Billy Wilder

    A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.

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    Billy Wilder

    [about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.

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    Billy Wilder

    A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

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    Billy Wilder

    After so many drive-in waitresses becoming movie stars, there has been this real drought, when along come class; somebody who actually went to school, can spell, maybe even plays the piano. She may be a wispy, thin little thing, but when you see that girl, you know you're really in the presence of something. In that league there's only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It's a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you've found it.

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    Billy Wilder

    Ah, Marilyn, Hollywood's Joan of Arc, our Ultimate Sacrificial Lamb. Well, let me tell you, she was mean, terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever known in this town. I am appalled by this Marilyn Monroe cult. Perhaps it's getting to be an act of courage to say the truth about her. Well, let me be courageous. I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.

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    Billy Wilder

    An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.

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    Billy Wilder

    An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.

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    Billy Wilder

    Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

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    Billy Wilder

    Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

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    Billy Wilder

    Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.

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    Billy Wilder

    Ever notice how these European trains always smell of eau de cologne and hard boiled eggs?

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    Billy Wilder

    Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot-the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.

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    Billy Wilder

    France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.

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    Billy Wilder

    God save me from myself.

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    Billy Wilder

    Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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    Billy Wilder

    Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

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    Billy Wilder

    I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

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    Billy Wilder

    I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.

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    Billy Wilder

    If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

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    Billy Wilder

    If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

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    Billy Wilder

    I had one life. And what did I do? Wasted it in some palooka preliminaries in Spain, just before Hitler and Chamberlain warm up for the main event.

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    Billy Wilder

    I hate that word. It's return--a return to the millions of people who've never forgiven me for deserting the screen.

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    Billy Wilder

    I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

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    Billy Wilder

    I'm delighted with it, because it used to be that films were the lowest form of art. Now we've got something to look down on.

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    Billy Wilder

    I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.

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    Billy Wilder

    I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.

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    Billy Wilder

    I never overestimate the audience, nor do I underestimate them. I just have a very rational idea as to who we’re dealing with, and that we’re not making a picture for Harvard Law School, we’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.

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    Billy Wilder

    It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How can I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

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    Billy Wilder

    I, you know, am all over the place — every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent. I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. … I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture, so I did `Witness for the Prosecution,’ then I was bored with it, so I moved on.

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    Billy Wilder

    Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.

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    Billy Wilder

    Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You've got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's "Pastoral." A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.

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    Billy Wilder

    Make subtlety obvious.

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    Billy Wilder

    My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?

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    Billy Wilder

    Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.

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    Billy Wilder

    On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.

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    Billy Wilder

    One's too many and a hundred's not enough.

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    Billy Wilder

    [on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

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    Billy Wilder

    She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift. Believe me, in the last fifteen years there were ten projects that came to me, and I'd start working on them and I'd think, 'It's not going to work, it needs Marilyn Monroe.' Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.

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    Billy Wilder

    The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

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    Billy Wilder

    The best director is the one you don't see.

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    Billy Wilder

    The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

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    Billy Wilder

    The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

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    Billy Wilder

    The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

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    Billy Wilder

    The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.

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    Billy Wilder

    Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

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    Billy Wilder

    We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

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    Billy Wilder

    Well, nobody's perfect.

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    Billy Wilder

    What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.

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    Billy Wilder

    When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.

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    Billy Wilder

    You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.