Quotes from Billy Wilder

Individually, the audience is stupid. Collectively, the audience is a genius.

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

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

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

Hindsight is always zo/20.

Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting.

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.

If you don't like what you're doing, it's unlikely anyone else will either, so be sure you are happy with your own work first.

They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won't work. She was an original.

It was hell at the time, but after it was over, it was wonderful.

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.

He has Van Gogh's ear for music.

Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.

You're as good as the best thing you've ever done.

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.

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

I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.

Breasts like granite and a brain like swiss cheese.

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.