I hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
BILLY WILDERShe may be a wispy, thin little thing, but when you see that girl, you know you’re really in the presence of something. In that league there’s only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It’s a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you’ve found it.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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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.
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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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You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.
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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 just made pictures I would’ve liked to see.
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Money makes even bastards legitimate.
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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 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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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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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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The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
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God save me from myself.
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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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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One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.
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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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Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house.
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She may be a wispy, thin little thing, but when you see that girl, you know you’re really in the presence of something. In that league there’s only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It’s a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you’ve found it.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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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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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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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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The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
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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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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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Make subtlety obvious.
BILLY WILDER