Billy Wilder Quotes

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

Make subtlety obvious.

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

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

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

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.

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.

Money makes even bastards legitimate.

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

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

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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

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

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

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.

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.

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that's the bunk. It's little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.

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.

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

God save me from myself.

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

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.

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.

Well, nobody's perfect.

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.

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