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

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
Plot
Points
Subtle
Writer
Better
Elegant
Hiding

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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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If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
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Well, nobody's perfect.
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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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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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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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If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
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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.
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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.
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An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
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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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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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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 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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
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