Billy Wilder Quotes (33 Quotes)

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

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

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

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

I've met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.

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

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

I would worship the ground you walk on, Audrey, if you only lived in a better neighborhood.

If there's anything I hate more than being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

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

If you're going to tell people the truth, make them laugh, or they'll kill you.

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.

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.

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

I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.

I just thought here is comedy, here is tragedy. That is the way life is. I just tried to do it true to life.

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

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.

You have Van Gogh's ear for music.

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

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

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

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.

It was hell at the time, but after it was over, it was wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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.