Billy Wilder Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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