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

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
Thirds
Problem
Firsts
First
Real
Writing
Third

More quotes by Billy Wilder

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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
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The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
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I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
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I am big. It's the pictures that got small.
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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
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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 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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Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
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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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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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
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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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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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Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
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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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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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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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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
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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.
Billy Wilder