Billy Wilder
You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.Collection: Dreams
Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.Collection: Trust
If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.Collection: Funny
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.Collection: Movies
He has Van Gogh's ear for music.Collection: Music
The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
One's too many, and a hundred's not enough.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
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.
Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.
I've met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.
I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
It was hell at the time, but after it was over, it was wonderful.
An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.
France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.
My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
The best director is the one you don't see.
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.
Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
France is the country where the money falls apart 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.
If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Firsts
You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.Collection: Done
The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Morning
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.Collection: Plot
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.Collection: Believe
Make subtlety obvious.Collection: Obvious
I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.Collection: Funny
On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.Collection: Doors
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.Collection: Stupid
Ever notice how these European trains always smell of eau de cologne and hard boiled eggs?Collection: Eggs
When Chaplin found a voice to say what was on his mind, he was like a child of eight writing lyrics for Beethoven's Ninth.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Events
[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.Collection: Sleep
Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Art
I hate that word. It's return--a return to the millions of people who've never forgiven me for deserting the screen.Collection: Hate