Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
BILLY WILDERAn actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
More Billy Wilder Quotes
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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.
BILLY WILDER -
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?
BILLY WILDER -
If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
BILLY WILDER -
Well, nobody’s perfect.
BILLY WILDER -
I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you – you’re twenty minutes.
BILLY WILDER -
God save me from myself.
BILLY WILDER -
The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
BILLY WILDER -
An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.
BILLY WILDER -
You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
BILLY WILDER -
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 WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift.
BILLY WILDER -
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 -
Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
BILLY WILDER -
I just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
BILLY WILDER -
Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
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.
BILLY WILDER -
I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
BILLY WILDER -
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
BILLY WILDER -
My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.
BILLY WILDER -
One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.
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 -
I hate that word. It’s return–a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
BILLY WILDER