Billy Wilder Quotes

The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting: the part that doesn't go according to what you expected.

Drama assumes an order. If only so that it might have - by disrupting that order - a way of surprising.

And I love the twist. I love to fool you once, I love to fool you twice, and on the very last page, quite often - very last paragraph sometimes - I like to just play with your perception one more time in a way that makes everything that came before just a little bit different.

There is a narrative of 'Washington fighting' because it's interesting and it's drama.

I begin with an interest in a relationship, a situation, a character.

It's very hard to write about that which is always beautiful and pleasant and good. You don't get anywhere with it. There's no friction in it. There's no trouble. You have to have trouble. Somebody's got to get in trouble, or no one wants to read it.

I don't like the fact that people are supposed to think horror movies have a way things should go. I always try to do the exact opposite of what people expect and want.

Legends don't have to make sense. They just have to be beautiful. Or at least interesting.

Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

he's a story i want to know from page one

I don't like the phrase shock value. Surprise is essential in comedy, and if people are shocked by what I consider merely surprising, then that's their shock. But there is no joke without surprise.

Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?

When I read the scripts, I'm always so excited to see what's going to happen because it's unpredictable.

...but the tale itself is a trickster and doesn't hesitate to lie. It is anachronistic with a vengeance. It emerges always and everywhere, overt or disguised, pureblood or hybrid, and healthy as sin.

I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.

Each kind of story has its own problems in writing, but my main concern really is to keep the reader on his toes, or to keep the strip unpredictable. I try to achieve some sort of balance between the two that keeps the reader wondering what's going to happen next and be surprised.

the announcement that you are going to tell a good story (and the chuckle that precedes it) is always a dangerous opening.

I guess storytelling's always been in my blood. My mom said I was always dressing up and jumping in front of the camera and putting on plays. There must be a part of me that has to express that. If we were living in prehistoric clans, I'd probably be sitting by the campfire taking two stones and showing you how dinosaurs were chasing us. I'd be the one finding a way to communicate and perform.

I'll want to hear,' Samuel said. 'I eat stories like grapes.

Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.

The secret to all drama, film, TV, or books - the thing that people respond to most, and the thing I find myself as a viewer feeling most interested in, is the idea of change.

It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do.

There's no good story without romance.

People think drama drives story, but I think the comedy is really the heart and soul.

However, it is always nice to be expected, and not to arrive.