Billy Wilder Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Billy Wilder

  Funny, Inspiring, Sarcastic

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

  57 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Trust, Mistake, Failure

  78 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Hate, Taken, I Hate

  46 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Real, Writing, Firsts

  40 Copy quote

• 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.

  Billy Wilder

  Mean, Fabulous, Towns

  53 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Good Morning, Dream, Inspiration

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

  49 Copy quote

• Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

  Billy Wilder

  Funny, History, Luck

  Quoted in J. R. Colombo, Wit and Wisdom of the Moviemakers (1979)

  93 Copy quote

• 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

  46 Copy quote

• 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, Actors, Able

  "The New Hollywood : American Movies in the '70s". Book by Axel Madsen, 1975.

  45 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Writing, Fire, Playing With Fire

  38 Copy quote

• 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, Ifs

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners" by Geoff Tibballs, (p. 206), 2004.

  44 Copy quote

• You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.

  Billy Wilder

  Done, Best Things

  33 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Believe, People, World

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  42 Copy quote

• 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.

  Billy Wilder

  Morning, Rain, Writing

  52 Copy quote

• Make subtlety obvious.

  Billy Wilder

  Obvious, Subtlety

  25 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Plot, Hiding, Subtle

  35 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Film Directing, Sycophants, Directors

  75 Copy quote

• I just made pictures I would've liked to see.

  Billy Wilder

  Made

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

  11 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Doors, Directors, Culture

  9 Copy quote

• We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

  Billy Wilder

  Track, Mediocre

  17 Copy quote

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

  Billy Wilder

  Funny, Eggs, Twenties

  "Fictional character: Lorraine". "Ace in the Hole", www.imdb.com. 1951.

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  63 Copy quote

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