Quotes from Gene Wilder

If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple

As they say in Corsica... Goodbye

Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?

What did you expect? Welcome, sonny? Make yourself at home? Marry my daughter? You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons

If the physical thing you're doing is funny, you don't have to act funny while doing it...Just be real and it will be funnier

I never thought of it as God. I didn't know what to call it. I don't believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them.

Climbing hills was never one of my great ambitions. Perhaps I was just lazy, but I admit--now that I've been climbing a hill every other day--that it's very difficult to think about the stresses in your life while you're trying to avoid falling backwards when a goat with large horns is chasing you because you came too close to the little patch of grass he was planning to eat for breakfast.

It's difficult to continue loving someone who shits on you.

I think to be believed—onstage or on-screen—is the one hope that all actors share. Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?

Making Young Frankenstein was the happiest I'd ever been on a film.

When I walked out of the movie theater I started thinking about my second-grade teacher, Miss Bernard, who used to put up paintings from almost all of the other boys and girls in my class on the classroom walls—paintings that she considered worthy—but she never put up one of mine. She never told me why or gave me an encouraging word, but I got the message: "You're no good at art, Jerry.

We went to Arizona to film the interiors of Stir Crazy in an actual prison. From Tucson, where we all stayed, it was an hour-and-a-half drive to the Arizona State Penitentiary. Sidney used real prisoners as extras. They had all been cleared by the prison authorities to work with us, and each prisoner was paid for every day he worked.

If Columbia Pictures had not succumbed to Richard's demands, and if I were a cocky, son-of-a-bitch movie star, and if Sidney Poitier had not held in his rage, there would have been no Stir Crazy. For the sake of my psychological health, I should have let out my anger at the time that I was angry. From the point of view of getting the picture made—I'm glad I didn't. The picture was a great success.

Gilda, you're talking like this is a fairy tale, and you're going to meet Prince Charming, and everything's going to be all right, and we'll both live happily ever after." "So what's wrong with that?

Gilda, if your marriage is so bad why don't you get out of it?" "I'm afraid to be alone.

The pictures in the magazines almost put me off my job completely. I've always hated those color photographs of naked women in those stupid positions that are supposed to turn men on. I never felt that there was anything sexy about them.

After ten months of no diagnoses or incorrect diagnoses—with her tummy distended as if she were hiding a small balloon under her dress—she finally heard it: "You have stage four ovarian cancer." Gilda grabbed my face in her hands and sobbed, "No more bad news, no more bad news. I don't want any more bad news.

then I took out a notepad and wrote my first poem. Across three thousand miles of sea and through strange England's smiling, and into a wee Scots Highland town there is a lad who's crying. Oh fool the world, he could, he could, a man at twenty years . . . but all alone in that Highland town there is a boy in tears.

Across three thousand miles of sea and through strange England's smiling, and into a wee Scots Highland town there is a lad who's crying. Oh fool the world, he could, he could, a man at twenty years . . . but all alone in that Highland town there is a boy in tears.

MARGIE: You want to know if she'll survive? She'll survive! Living with someone who doesn't want to be there would do more harm.

In all the time we spent together, we had only one argument. I can't even remember what it was about; I just remember that he yelled at me. Ten minutes after he left, he called me on the phone from his house: "WHO WAS THAT MADMAN YOU HAD IN YOUR HOUSE? I COULD HEAR THE YELLING ALL THE WAY OVER HERE. YOU SHOULD NEVER LET CRAZY PEOPLE INTO YOUR HOUSE—DON'T YOU KNOW THAT? THEY COULD BE DANGEROUS.

if the thing you're doing is really funny, you don't need to "act funny" while doing it.

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.