An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
BILLY WILDERI, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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Well, nobody’s perfect.
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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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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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Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
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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 met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you – you’re twenty minutes.
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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 director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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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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I hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
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Make subtlety obvious.
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
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Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe or as utterly fabulous on the screen.
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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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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Money makes even bastards legitimate.
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I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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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 you don’t like what you’re doing, it’s unlikely anyone else will either, so be sure you are happy with your own work first.
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France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
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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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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 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.
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God save me from myself.
BILLY WILDER