Top 58 Billy Wilder Quotes
#1. My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
Billy Wilder
#2. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
Billy Wilder
#3. France is the country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.
Billy Wilder
#5. 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.
Billy Wilder
#6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
Billy Wilder
#7. I just always think, 'Do I like it?' And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
Billy Wilder
#8. I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
Billy Wilder
#9. Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.
Billy Wilder
#10. If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
Billy Wilder
#11. One's too many, and a hundred's not enough.
Billy Wilder
#12. An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.
Billy Wilder
#13. 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
#14. The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
Billy Wilder
#15. 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
#16. I just made pictures I would've liked to see.
Billy Wilder
#17. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
Billy Wilder
#19. 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.
Billy Wilder
#21. My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.
Billy Wilder
#22. An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
Billy Wilder
#23. I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
Billy Wilder
#24. Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.
Billy Wilder
#25. 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
#26. On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.
Billy Wilder
#27. Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
Billy Wilder
#28. That's the trouble with you readers. You know all the plots.
Billy Wilder
#29. A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
Billy Wilder
#30. I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.
Billy Wilder
#31. If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
Billy Wilder
#32. We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
Billy Wilder
#33. Ever notice how these European trains always smell of eau de cologne and hard boiled eggs?
Billy Wilder
#35. I've met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.
Billy Wilder
#36. France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.
Billy Wilder
#37. The best director is the one you don't see.
Billy Wilder
#38. It was hell at the time, but after it was over, it was wonderful.
Billy Wilder
#39. 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.
Billy Wilder
#41. They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won't work. She was an original.
Billy Wilder
#42. The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.
Billy Wilder
#43. 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
#44. If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
Billy Wilder
#45. Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh ... I'm a man.
Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
Billy Wilder
#46. Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
Billy Wilder
#47. You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
Billy Wilder
#49. I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
Billy Wilder
#51. Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
Billy Wilder
#52. The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
Billy Wilder
#54. You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.
Billy Wilder
#55. What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
Billy Wilder
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.
Billy Wilder
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