They’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won’t work. She was an original.
BILLY WILDERI just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
-
-
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.
BILLY WILDER -
God save me from myself.
BILLY WILDER -
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?
BILLY WILDER -
I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you – you’re twenty minutes.
BILLY WILDER -
Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
BILLY WILDER -
If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
BILLY WILDER -
If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
BILLY WILDER -
Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
BILLY WILDER -
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
BILLY WILDER -
I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
BILLY WILDER -
My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.
BILLY WILDER -
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 -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
BILLY WILDER -
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 -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
BILLY WILDER -
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
BILLY WILDER -
I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.
BILLY WILDER -
I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
BILLY WILDER