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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

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

Billy Wilder

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

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  Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

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  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.

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

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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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  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.

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

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

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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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• 

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

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

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

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

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  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.

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  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.

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

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  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.

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  She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift.

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