Billy Wilder Quotes

We are not a TV station that only concentrate on those who are always under light. We are not a TV station for celebrities and for grand politicians and superstars. We are a TV station for the ordinary person. The normal people, ordinary people in the Arab world sees Al Jazeera as their voice.

But you can't really know your audiences so well.

I think HBO seems to have an extraordinary clever knack of catching the pulse of its audience. It really, really knows its audience.

When you are producing for ABC, you are producing for a big tent network. So when you are thinking about your story lines and characters, you are thinking about broad appeal. When you are producing for a niche interest, you are producing for a different audience.

All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.

You've got to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience is thinking, and know what they'll accept from you.

I want my films to get audiences. I am not interested in making them just for myself.

I write to the vulgar more than the learned.

What does annoy me is when critics use me to ridicule my audience. All the stuff about 'Tesco housewives' and 'the blue-rinse brigade.'

Of course, you have to think of the audience. You cannot make an obtuse film that only appeals to a small niche section of the audience.

The multiplexes audience has one way of thinking. When they are all sitting together temperamentally, there is room for a filmmaker to reach out to a far larger audience in a comfortable way.

When I was on the big labels, I never calculated what would make me sell more records. I just did what I did -no different than when I wrote songs for myself in high-school.

Any time one seeks to produce for a larger public one inevitably has to drop material that would only be understood by a particular group.

Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.

At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.

The working-class folks and the poor, and those normal people living their lives out in the world without the glitter and the fanfare. There is a lot to learn from them.

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

If you want to relate to a certain audience or generation, you have to speak their language. I truly believe that.

We don't go to school to learn, but to be soaked in the prejudices of our class, without which we should be useless and unhappy.

I'm very clumsy, so there's been a lot of times I've tripped in front of girls I'm in love with, or spilled food all over myself. My friends and I were the class clowns in high school, so one day we were showing off at our seats and I fell off my chair! I had to get stitches, and I had a bloody lip. I was trying so hard to be a cool class clown!

And it's exactly what's wrong with the radio. It's like...anything that tries to appeal to everybody always ends up sounding so cheap.

What makes a nation great is not primarily its great men, but the stature of its innumerable mediocre ones.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

I never read in school. I got really bad grades-D's and F's and C's in some classes, and A's and B's in other classes. In the second week of the 11th grade, I just quit. When I was in school, it was really difficult. Almost everything I learned, I had to learn by listening. My report cards always said that I was not living up to my potential.