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.
BILLY WILDERYou 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.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
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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.
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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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I just made pictures I would’ve liked to see.
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I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
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The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
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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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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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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 big. It’s the pictures that got small.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
BILLY WILDER -
My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.
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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 -
France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
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God save me from myself.
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Well, nobody’s perfect.
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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, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
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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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Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
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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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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER