Billy Wilder Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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. 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. I have never met anyone as utterly mean as Marilyn Monroe. Nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.

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

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

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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. 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.

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

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

She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift. Believe me, in the last fifteen years there were ten projects that came to me, and I'd start working on them and I'd think, 'It's not going to work, it needs Marilyn Monroe.' Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.

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.

Make subtlety obvious.

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

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

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? 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.

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

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

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