Billy Wilder famous quotes

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

#Mistake #Failure #Life Is Short

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

#Funny #Sarcastic #Truth

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Stupid #Book #Fighting

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

#Sycophants #Directors #Midwife

If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
-- Billy Wilder

#Hate #Taken #I Hate

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

#Cutting #Finals #Nine

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

#Good Morning #Dream #Morning

If you don't like what you're doing, it's unlikely anyone else will either, so be sure you are happy with your own work first.
-- Billy Wilder

#Firsts #Unlikely

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

#Dirty #Lust #Film

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Work #Dark #Together

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

#Real #Writing #Firsts

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#School #Law #Class

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
-- Billy Wilder

#Movie #Winning #Awards

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

#Doors #Entering #Actors

My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.
-- Billy Wilder

#Mixtures #Schwarzenegger

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

#Hollywood #Killing

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

#Directors

I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
-- Billy Wilder

#Sleep #Bathroom #Hotel

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Bored #Moved On #Made

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Believe #Thinking #Years

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre...
-- Billy Wilder

#Track #Mediocre

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Writing #Cameras #Twenties

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
-- Billy Wilder

#Character #Lines #Action

I just always think, 'Do I like it?' And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
-- Billy Wilder

#Thinking #People

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

#Religion #Church #Nylon

I just made pictures I would've liked to see.
-- Billy Wilder

#Made

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Daughter #Father #Thinking

You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.
-- Billy Wilder

#Done

One's too many and a hundred's not enough.
-- Billy Wilder

#Enough #Hundred

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

#Travel #Money #Fall

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

#Funny #Worship #Neighbor

They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won't work. She was an original.
-- Billy Wilder

#Trying #Keep Trying

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
-- Billy Wilder

#Happiness

I've met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.
-- Billy Wilder

#Funny #Eggs #Twenties

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

#Clever #Obvious #Subtlety

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

#Believe #People #World

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

#Aunt #Pay #Punctuation

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

#Men #Perfect #Wells

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
-- Billy Wilder

#Life #Music #Sarcastic

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
-- Billy Wilder

#History #Twenties #Hindsight

Money makes even bastards legitimate.
-- Billy Wilder

#Money

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
-- Billy Wilder

#Bigs

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?
-- Billy Wilder

#Smell #Hot #Afternoon

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

#Genius #Idiot #Tricks

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Art #Looks #Television

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

#Plot #Hiding #Subtle

God save me from myself.
-- Billy Wilder

#Catchy #Save Me

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

#Writing #Fire #Playing With Fire

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Girl #Stars #Real

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.
-- Billy Wilder

#Mean #Men #Interesting