The best director is the one you don't see.
— Billy Wilder
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.
My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.
It was hell at the time, but after it was over, it was wonderful.
Happiness is working with Jack Lemmon.
An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.
Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.
He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.
France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can't tear the toilet paper.
If there's anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it's being taken too seriously.
France is the country where the money falls apart and you can't tear the toilet paper.
I've met a lot of hardboiled eggs in my time, but you're twenty minutes.
I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.
I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
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.
One's too many, and a hundred's not enough.
They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes and they will undoubtedly keep trying. But it won't work. She was an original.
Don't be too clever for an audience. Make it obvious. Make the subtleties obvious also.
I'd worship the ground you walked on if only you walked in a better neighborhood.
If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.
We are on the track of something absolutely mediocre.
You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning.
Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.
Trust your own instinct. Your mistakes might as well be your own, instead of someone else's.
