Billy Wilder Quotes

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.

My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

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.

You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

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.

I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

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.

The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.

The best director is the one you don't see.

Make subtlety obvious.

France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.

Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won't work. She was an original.

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?

God save me from myself.

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.

My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.

I just always think, 'Do I like it?' And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.

[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.

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.

What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.

Money makes even bastards legitimate.

The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

I just made pictures I would've liked to see.

It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How can I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

Well, nobody's perfect.

One's too many and a hundred's not enough.

I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.

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.

An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.

[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.

I hate that word. It's return--a return to the millions of people who've never forgiven me for deserting the screen.

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.

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.

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.