Quote

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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Billy Wilder
Age: 95 †
Born: 1906
Born: June 22
Died: 2002
Died: March 27
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Journalist
Screenwriter
Writer
Samuel Wilder
Child
Voice
Found
Children
Chaplin
Writing
Ninth
Mind
Beethoven
Like
Lyrics
Eight

More quotes by Billy Wilder

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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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Develop a clean line of action for your leading character
Billy Wilder
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Make subtlety obvious.
Billy Wilder
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An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius.
Billy Wilder
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I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.
Billy Wilder
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We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
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 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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[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
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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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.
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 have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
Billy Wilder
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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.
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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I'm not happy. I'm not happy at all.
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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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
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God save me from myself.
Billy Wilder