Billy Wilder Quotes

A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.

This was Shakespeare's form; who walked in every path of human life, felt every passion; and to all mankind doth now, will ever, that experience yield which his own genius only could acquire.

The most common thing over the years is, 'What's it like to work with David Lynch?' That's absolutely the fascination, whether it's people that are in the industry or it's just diehard fans. Because he's our modern-day master. We're lucky enough to be alive at the time that an absolute master and genius is working.

When you deal with Alan Ball, you're dealing with a person who is a genius in terms of how art imitates life.

Genius gives birth, talent delivers.

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

If there is an auteur who influenced me - and there is only one - that is Charlie Chaplin. And he never won an Oscar.

One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.

Good taste cannot supply the place of genius in literature, for the best proof of taste, when there is no genius, would be, not to write at all.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

It is the melody which is the charm of music, and it is that which is most difficult to produce. The invention of a fine melody is a work of genius.

The productions of a great genius, with many lapses and inadvertences, are infinitely preferable to the works of an inferior kind of author which are scrupulously exact, and conformable to all the rules of correct writing.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.

What a genius, that Picasso. It is a pity he doesn't paint.

Geniuses can be scintillating and geniuses can be somber, but it's that inescapable sorrowful depth that shines through-originality.

Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.

All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

His [Michael Jackson] behavior was weird, but when you get an artist and a genius, many of the geniuses throughout our whole history were weird. And they did weird things because none of us could understand what was on their mind and why they did what they did.

Genius in general is poetic. Where genius has been active it has been poetically active. The truly moral person is a poet.

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker... But it is not an art form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.