Billy Wilder Quotes

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

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

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

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

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.

France is the country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.

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.

If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?

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.

Make subtlety obvious.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

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.

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

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

Everyone in the audience is an idiot, but taken together, they're a genius.

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

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

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

Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.

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

God save me from myself.

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

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

It was hell at the time, but after it was over, it was wonderful.

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

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

Money makes even bastards legitimate.

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

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.

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.

That's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise

I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.

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.

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

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