Billy Wilder

Samuel "Billy" Wilder was a screenwriter, film director, and producer whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films.

On working in the movies

• 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.

• An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.

• 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.

• I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

• I just made pictures I would've liked to see.

• People copy, people steal. Most of the pictures they make nowadays are loaded down with special effects. I couldn't do that. I quit smoking because I couldn't reload my Zippo.

• [To a cameraman on one of his pictures] Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.

On life

• Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles isn't a realist.

• Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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

• You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.

Other

• He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

• Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

• 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.

• My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.

• The Austrians have completed the feat of turning Beethoven into an Austrian, and Hitler into a German. ("Die Österreicher haben das Kunststück fertiggebracht, aus Beethoven einen Österreicher und aus Hitler einen Deutschen zu machen." - DER SPIEGEL, 32/2001 DER SPIEGEL 20/1994 vom 16.05.1994, Seite 215-216)