Billy Wilder Quotes

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Make subtlety obvious.

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

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

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

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

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.

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

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

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

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

God save me from myself.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money makes even bastards legitimate.

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?

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

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

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

Well, nobody's perfect.