Top 50 Billy Wilder Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “God save me from myself.”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

Featured in: Dreaming Big Quotes, Good Morning Quotes, Famous Movie Quotes

3. “The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

5. “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”

— Billy Wilder

6. “Don’t be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.”

— Billy Wilder

7. “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

9. “He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”

— Billy Wilder

10. “If there’s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it’s being taken too seriously.”

— Billy Wilder

11. “If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.”

— Billy Wilder

12. “One’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.”

— Billy Wilder

13. “An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.”

— Billy Wilder

Featured in: Quotes About Actors

14. “A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.”

— Billy Wilder

15. “If something smells bad, why put your nose in it?”

— Billy Wilder

16. “On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.”

— Billy Wilder

17. “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.”

— Billy Wilder

18. “You’re as good as the best thing you’ve ever done.”

— Billy Wilder

19. “Hollywood didn’t kill Marilyn Monroe, it’s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.”

— Billy Wilder

20. “The best director is the one you don’t see.”

— Billy Wilder

21. “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.”

— Billy Wilder

22. “I just always think, ‘Do I like it?’ And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too.”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

24. “It was a hot afternoon and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along the street. How can I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

26. “I’m not happy. I’m not happy at all.”

— Billy Wilder

27. “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”

— Billy Wilder

28. “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

29. “I’ve met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you’re twenty minutes.”

— Billy Wilder

30. “France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.”

— Billy Wilder

31. “Make subtlety obvious.”

— Billy Wilder

32. “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.”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

34. “The only pictures worth making are the ones that are playing with fire.”

— Billy Wilder

35. “We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre...”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

37. “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

38. “Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.”

— Billy Wilder

39. “My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Tutu.”

— Billy Wilder

40. “I just made pictures I would’ve liked to see.”

— Billy Wilder

41. “I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.”

— Billy Wilder

42. “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

43. “I’d worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.”

— Billy Wilder

44. “Money makes even bastards legitimate.”

— Billy Wilder

45. “I hate that word. It’s return – a return to the millions of people who’ve never forgiven me for deserting the screen.”

— Billy Wilder

46. “Everyone in the audience is an idiot, but taken together, they’re a genius.”

— Billy Wilder

47. “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

48. “Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.”

— Billy Wilder

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

— Billy Wilder

50. “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