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

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.

Agents are like tires on a car; in order to get anywhere at all, you

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

France is the only country where the money falls apart and you can`t tear the toilet paper.

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

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

[on Marilyn Monroe] Breasts like granite and a brain like Swiss cheese.

What critics call dirty in our movies, they call lusty in foreign films.

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

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that [Adolf Hitler] was a German and [Ludwig van Beethoven] an Austrian.

[on Marlene Dietrich] Mother Teresa with better legs.

If there`s anything I hate more than not being taken seriously, it`s being taken too seriously.

Some pictures play wonderfully to a room of eight people. I don`t go for that. I go for the masses. I go for the end effect.

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

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.

The close-up is such a valuable thing -- like a trump at a bridge.

The Wilder message is don`t bore - don`t bore people.

[opon seeing Sigmund Freud`s therapy couch] It was a very tiny little thing. All his theories were based on the analysis of very short people!

The subtlest comedy you can get right now is MASH (1970). They don`t want to see a picture unless Peter Fonda is running over a dozen people or unless Clint Eastwood has got a machine gun bigger then 140 penises. It gets bigger all the time, you know; it started out as a pistol and now it`s a machine gun. Something which is warm and funny and gentle and urbane and civilized hasn`t got a chance today. There is a lack of patience which is sweeping the nation - or the world, for that matter.

[On Ace in the Hole (1951)] I was attacked by every paper because of that movie. They loathed it. It was cynical, they said. Cynical, my ass. I tell you, you read about a plane crash somewhere nearby and you want to check out the scene, you can`t get to it because ten thousand people are already there: they`re picking up little scraps, ghoulish souvenir hunters. After I read those horrifying reviews about "Ace in the Hole", I remember I was going down Wilshire Boulevard and there was an automobile accident. Somebody was run over. I stopped my car. I wanted to help that guy who was run over. Then another guy jumps out of his car and photographs the thing. "You`d better call an ambulance," I said. "Call a doctor, my ass. I`ve got to get to the L.A. Times. I`ve got a picture. I`ve got to move. I just took a picture here. I`ve got to deliver it." But you say that in a movie, and the critics think you`re exaggerating."

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

Anyone who doesn`t believe in miracles isn`t a realist.

I just made pictures I would`ve liked to see.

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."

I was not a guy writing deep-dish revelations. If people see a picture of mine and then sit down and talk about it for 15 minutes, that is a very fine reward, I think.

An actor enters through a door, you`ve got nothing. But if he enters through a window, you`ve got a situation.

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

The best director is the one you don`t see.

[on Marilyn Monroe] An endless puzzle without any solution.

You watch, the new wave will discover the slow dissolve in ten years or so.

[asked if it was important for a director to know how to write] No, but it helps if he knows how to read.

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

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

Making movies is little like walking into a dark room. Some people stumble across furniture, others break their legs but some of us see better in the dark than others. The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade.

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

[about the Hotel Marmont on Sunset Blvd., a piece of Hollywood history] I would rather sleep in a bathroom than in another hotel.

In certain pictures I do hope they will leave the cinema a little enriched, but I don`t make them pay a buck and a half and then ram a lecture down their throats.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

My Aunt Minnie would always be punctual and never hold up production, but who would pay to see my Aunt Minnie?

Hollywood didn`t kill Marilyn Monroe; it`s the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

Today we spend 80% of the time making deals and 20% making pictures.

[after directing Marilyn Monroe for the second time in Some Like It Hot (1959)] I have discussed this with my doctor and my psychiatrist and they tell me I`m too old and too rich to go through this again.

[in 1976] They say Wilder is out of touch with his times. Frankly, I regard it as a compliment. Who the hell wants to be in touch with these times?