Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
BILLY WILDERThe Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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 -
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 -
If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
BILLY WILDER -
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.
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 -
Eighty percent of a picture is writing, the other twenty percent is the execution, such as having the camera on the right spot and being able to afford to have good actors in all parts.
BILLY WILDER -
If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
BILLY WILDER -
You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.
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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.
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







