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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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Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Wasted
Hitler
Event
Main
Warm
Events
Life
Chamberlain
Spain

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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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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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Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
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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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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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I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
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What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
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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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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 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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The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
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God save me from myself.
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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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If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?
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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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