Billy Wilder Quotes

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

Stories work better when not everyone gets what they want.

We need the villain sometimes. It makes for an interesting story.

Every writer has compressed time and procedure, and used clarifying dialogue. That's not a scandal: it's a legitimate dramatic technique.

Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

Conflict is the place where character and plot intersect.

Very often, I'm part of the deception because the way I play things is that I want you to be able to look back and go, "Oh, my god, I didn't see that at the time, but now it all makes sense," and you want to watch it a second time with the benefit of hindsight.

I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we're walking in.

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

Character is plot, plot is character.

The story is not in the plot but in the telling.

Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.

You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.

I was born in the era of the novel. I've written many, as well as collections of poetry, and essays for mouthing off. I've written to inches, word-counts, page-counts, even the sonnet and the screenplay (which I call a plot poem). I write narrative. That's it. I just want to tell it.

Of course, I'm being rude. I'm spoiling the ending, not only of the entire book, but of this particular piece of it. I have given you two events in advance, because I don't have much interest in building mystery. Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It's the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me. There are many things to think of. There is much story.

I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre.

But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

Anything that happens on any show is a plot contrivance because that's just storytelling.

Imagination? It is the one thing beside honesty that a good writer must have. The more he learns from experience the more he can imagine.

Once upon a time, something happened, and it was better than something not happening. The end.

I'm frustrated when I see movies in which I feel like the plot is being told to me instead of shown to me.