"You're as good as the best thing you've ever done."
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Quote collection
Billy Wilder quotes (page 2 of 4)
64 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"The best director is the one you don't see."
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"Make subtlety obvious."
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"Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also."
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"France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper."
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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."
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"I am big. It's the pictures that got small."
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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."
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"Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award."
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"We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre."
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"Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood."
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"If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?"
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"My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu."
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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."
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"God save me from myself."
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"[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
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"What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films."
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"I just always think, 'Do I like it?' And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too."
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"I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes."
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