Billy Wilder Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Billy Wilder
Question: What is an associate producer?
Billy Wilder: Anybody who's prepared to associate with a producer.

Billy Wilder
To his lighting cameraman:
Johnny, it's the usual slashed-wrist shot…Keep it out of focus. I want to win the foreign picture award.

Billy Wilder
What they [critics] call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.

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

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

Billy Wilder
A modern-day Robin Hood, who steals from the rich and steals from the poor.
Of Sam Spiegel

Billy Wilder
How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?

Billy Wilder
Of television:
It used to be that we in films were the lowest form of art. Now we have something to look down on.

Billy Wilder
To his future wife Audrey Young:
I would worship the ground you walk on, Audrey, if you only lived in a better neighborhood.

Billy Wilder
The first nine commandments for a director are 'Thou shalt not bore.' The tenth is 'Thou shalt have the right of final cut.'

Billy Wilder
Not believing the news that Peter Sellers had had a heart attack:
What do you mean, heart attack? You've got to have a heart before you can have an attack.

Billy Wilder
Medals, they're like haemorrhoids. Sooner or later every asshole gets one.

Billy Wilder
One day it happens. Success happens and it catches you by surprise. One day you are a signature, next day, you are an autograph.

Billy Wilder
Look how she moves! It's like Jell-O on springs.

Billy Wilder
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
All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up.

Billy Wilder
I just made pictures I would've liked to see.
"The truth always reveals itself."

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

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

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

Billy Wilder
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
On Marilyn Monroe's unpunctuality:
My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?

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

Billy Wilder
A woman without a man is like a trailer without a car; it ain't going nowhere.

Billy Wilder
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