Quote

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

Billy Wilder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Jerry
Nobody
Perfect
Understand
Wells
Well
Men

More quotes by Billy Wilder

Image
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
Image
Make subtlety obvious.
Billy Wilder
Image
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
Billy Wilder
Image
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
Image
I just always think, 'Do I like it?' And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.
Billy Wilder
Image
The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.
Billy Wilder
Image
We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
Billy Wilder
Image
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
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.
Billy Wilder
Image
If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
Billy Wilder
Image
The best director is the one you don't see.
Billy Wilder
Image
If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
Billy Wilder
Image
The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
Billy Wilder