Billy Wilder Quotes

If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.

If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?

One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.

I’m not happy. I’m not happy at all.

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.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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

Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else’s.

The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they’re a genius.

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.

Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.