Quote

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
Spain
Wasted
Hitler
Event
Main
Warm
Events
Life
Chamberlain

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I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
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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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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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
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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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I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.
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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 am big. It's the pictures that got small.
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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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If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
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A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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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 met a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my life, but you - you're twenty minutes.
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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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Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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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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Make subtlety obvious.
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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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I just made pictures I would've liked to see.
Billy Wilder