My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
BILLY WILDERI, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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Jerry: Oh, you don’t understand, Osgood! Ehhhh… I’m a man. Osgood: Well, nobody’s perfect.
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I, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
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[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
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Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
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They’ve tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won’t work. She was an original.
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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.
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The best director is the one you don’t see.
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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.
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I hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
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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.
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I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.
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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.
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You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.
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The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
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If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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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.
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I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
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An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
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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.
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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?
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I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you – you’re twenty minutes.
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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
BILLY WILDER