Billy Wilder quotes:

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

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.

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

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

France is the country where the money falls apart and 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?

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.

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

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

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

Ever notice how these European trains always smell of eau de cologne and hard boiled eggs?

If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

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

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

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.

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

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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.

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

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

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.

Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.

Well, nobody's perfect.

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.

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

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

I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.

The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.

You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.

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.

The best director is the one you don't see.

Make subtlety obvious.

The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.

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.

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?

God save me from myself.

Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

I just made pictures I would've liked to see.

I just always think, 'Do I like it?' And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.

Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.

If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

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.

Money makes even bastards legitimate.

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

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.

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

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.

I hate that word. It's return--a return to the millions of people who've never forgiven me for deserting the screen.

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.

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

We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre...

Develop a clean line of action for your leading character

On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.