A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
BILLY WILDERAn actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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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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If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
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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 had one life. And what did I do? Wasted it in some palooka preliminaries in Spain, just before Hitler and Chamberlain warm up for the main event.
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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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God save me from myself.
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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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Jerry: Oh, you don’t understand, Osgood! Ehhhh… I’m a man. Osgood: Well, nobody’s perfect.
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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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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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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
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The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
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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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
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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.
BILLY WILDER