If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
BILLY WILDERIf something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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God save me from myself.
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One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.
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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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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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Well, nobody’s perfect.
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If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
BILLY WILDER