Gene Wilder Quotes

Time is a precious thing. Never waste it.

As they say in Corsica... Goodbye!

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple

I never used to believe in fate. I used to think you make your own life and then you call it fate. That's why I call it irony.

So shines a good deed... in a weary world.

If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?

For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius!

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.This was said by gene wilder ... what does it mean ?

The suspense is terrible. I hope it'll last.

On stage or in the movies I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

Dont put the sheep on the table.

If the physical thing you're doing is funny, you don't have to act funny while doing it...Just be real and it will be funnier

To match the shoes with the jacket is fey. To match the shoes with the hat is taste.

Little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous.

When you please your mother by doing something, it gives you confidence that you can please other people.

I'm funny on camera sometimes. In life, once in a while. Once in a while.

I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track. But yes, I don't like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it.

I don't mean to sound - I don't want it to come out funny, but I don't like show business. I love - I love acting in films. I love it.

I'd like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn't know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?

Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?

So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I'm doing that, then I snap out of it.

Actors fall into this trap if they missed being loved for who they really were and not for what they could do - sing, dance, joke about - then they take that as love.

I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.

I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

Woody makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic, or political.

I was so afraid to feel free to enjoy my own life if my mother was sick and suffering everyday of her's. I didn't think I had the right.

But the acting process - create a human being - was real, not only to the audience, but real to me.

A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.

I'm in complete remission. I'm alive and well.

Gene Wilder characters wanted to be calm, but to the great delight of audiences, they rarely succeeded.

I'm not very funny in real life. I used to want to be a comedian when I was 13, 14, 15, till I saw "Death Of A Salesman" with Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock.

And in 'Frisco Kid' and in 'The Woman in Red' I had to ride badly. Then you have to really ride well in order to ride badly.

When your mother gives you confidence about anything that you do, you carry that confidence with you.She made me believe that I could make someone laugh.

I want to be an actor, maybe a comic actor but a real actor.

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

I certainly didn't have New York Jewish humor. But I was in three Mel Brooks films so people thought I was a connoisseur of New York Jewish humor.

I had improvised a lot in classes and at the Actors Studio, but I never did it in front of the camera.

Gene Wilder often said that his job as an actor wasn't to make something funny but to make it real.

Zero Mostel wasn't afraid of authority in any form, and that's the part that influenced me the most.

I found a very diabolical way of making myself suffer - not in the same way [my mother ] was suffering but to prevent me from enjoying my own life.

I put out my hand to shake hands with Zero Mostel, and he took my hand [and] he pulled me up to his face, and he gave me a kiss on the lips. And all my nervousness went out the window.

[Gilda Radner] died in '89, and I got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2000. I've just passed the five-year mark and I'm now what you call - well, it's called complete remission, but I'm cured. I'm fine.

I met Richard Pryor for the first time in Calgary, in Canada. A very quiet, modest meeting.

I had a daughter and lost her a long while ago. That's too sad a story to go into.

I know a lot of sad people who aren't comedians.

I feel alone and safe in public.