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

Billy Wilder

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Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Brilliant
Made
Believe
World
People
Austrian
Beethoven
Hitler
German

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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
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If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
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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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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.
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I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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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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If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
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The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.
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My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
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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.
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Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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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.
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I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.
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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
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