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.
BILLY WILDERI hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
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Make subtlety obvious.
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I just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
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The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
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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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I just made pictures I would’ve liked to see.
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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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I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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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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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 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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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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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 ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.
BILLY WILDER