Billy Wilder Quotes - Page 2

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

God save me from myself.

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

After so many drive-in waitresses becoming movie stars, there has been this real drought, when along come class; somebody who actually went to school, can spell, maybe even plays the piano. She may be a wispy, thin little thing, but when you see that girl, you know you're really in the presence of something. In that league there's only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It's a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you've found it.

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

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, we’re making a picture for middle-class people, the people that you see on the subway, or the people that you see in a restaurant. Just normal people.

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

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

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

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

Money makes even bastards legitimate.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I, you know, am all over the place — every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent. I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. … I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture, so I did `Witness for the Prosecution,’ then I was bored with it, so I moved on.

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

Well, nobody's perfect.

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

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?

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.

I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

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