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If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.

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
Seriously
Taken
Hate
Anything

More quotes by Billy Wilder

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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.
Billy Wilder
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Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
Billy Wilder
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Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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I just made pictures I would've liked to see.
Billy Wilder
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Well, nobody's perfect.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
Billy Wilder
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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
Billy Wilder
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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
Billy Wilder
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God save me from myself.
Billy Wilder
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The best director is the one you don't see.
Billy Wilder
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Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
Billy Wilder
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I met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder
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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.
Billy Wilder