If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.
BILLY WILDERMake subtlety obvious.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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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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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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The best director is the one you don’t see.
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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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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.
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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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Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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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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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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.
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I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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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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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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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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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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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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My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
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One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.
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Well, nobody’s perfect.
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[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
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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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The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
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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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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
BILLY WILDER