Billy Wilder Quotes

60 quotes in 716 categories

• If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
• Money makes even bastards legitimate.
• I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
• One's too many and a hundred's not enough.
• 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…
• You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.
• I, you know, am all over the place — every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent. I could not make, like…
• 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…
• We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre...
• Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
• 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…
• What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
• If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
• The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.
• God save me from myself.
• 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…
• The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
• 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.
• If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
• 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,…

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