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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.

Billy Wilder

I, you know, am all over the place – every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent.
BILLY WILDER

Bored Category Moved People
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

Daughter Father Thinking
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.
BILLY WILDER

First Firsts Own Unlikely
Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
BILLY WILDER

Country Hollywood Killing People
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.
BILLY WILDER

Fabulous Mean Towns
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

Grandmother Kings Old Thinking Tree
I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
BILLY WILDER

Church Nylon Religion
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.
BILLY WILDER

Able Actors Camera Writing
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
BILLY WILDER

Hiding Plot Subtle
Make subtlety obvious.
BILLY WILDER

Make Obvious Subtlety
[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

Bathroom Hotel Sleep Sunset
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

Country People Ring Smell Sound Stationery Telephone
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
BILLY WILDER

Funny History Luck
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

Hate People Return Screen
If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.
BILLY WILDER

Funny Inspiring Sarcastic
If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
BILLY WILDER

Bad Noses Smell

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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