Quotes by Billy Wilder - Page 2 | QuoteForever

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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Art
Looks
Television
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Firsts
Ifs
Unlikely
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They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won't work. She was an original.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Keep Trying
Originals
Trying
Original
Work Will Trying
Manufacture
Undoubtedly
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[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Bathroom
Hotel
Sleep
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Work
Audience
Critical
Dark
Genius
Imbeciles
Individual
May
Thousand
Together
Wrong
Imbecile
Member
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I had one life. And what did I do? Wasted it in some palooka preliminaries in Spain, just before Hitler and Chamberlain warm up for the main event.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Chamberlain
Events
Spain
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Animal
Elephants
Turkeys
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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?
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Afternoon
Hot
Smell
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Fabulous
Mean
Towns
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Kings
Grandmother
Thinking
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Men
Interesting
Mean
Scene
Window
Doorway
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Daughter
Father
Thinking
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Able
Actors
Writing
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Bored
Made
Moved On
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Class
Law
School
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Believe
Thinking
Years
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Book
Fighting
Stupid
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Morning
Rain
Writing
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Fabulous
Mean
Towns
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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.
Billy Wilder / Filmmaker
Girl
Real
Stars
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