Gene Wilder Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Gene Wilder:
What good is a character who's always winking at the audience to let them in on the secret?
~Gene Wilder
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I've had a very good life and a very good career. I have no regrets.
~Gene Wilder
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I don't mean to sound - I don't want it to come out funny, but I don't like show business. I love - I love acting in films. I love it.
~Gene Wilder
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So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I'm doing that, then I snap out of it.
~Gene Wilder
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If there's an audience, I think they're going to expect me to be funny. But what if I'm not funny? What if I fail?
~Gene Wilder
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Success is a terrible thing and a wonderful thing. If you can enjoy it, it's wonderful. If it starts eating away at you, and they're waiting for more from me, or what can I do to top this, then you're in trouble. Just do what you love. That's all I want to do.
~Gene Wilder
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I worked two days in Texas and two days in Hollywood on 'Bonnie and Clyde,' and that was it. I had no idea how it was going to turn out. And when I saw it, I was so upset, or fascinated, or something, by the sight of myself on the screen that I could hardly pay attention to the rest of the movie.
~Gene Wilder
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I'm going to tell you what my religion is. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Period. Terminato. Finito.
~Gene Wilder
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I never used to believe in fate. I used to think you make your own life, and then you call it fate.
~Gene Wilder
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The world is not based on fairness. Human beings can rise to fairness, can administer something that makes it fair or just. But that's not God.
~Gene Wilder
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Whatever simplicity I've achieved in writing, I think I owe most of it to Jean Renoir and Hemingway: simple, declarative sentences. I've read some very good writers, but the sentences were so long that I've forgotten what the point was.
~Gene Wilder
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When you fall in love, and you're very young, you think that that's the love of your life. And maybe it is, but it usually doesn't turn out that way.
~Gene Wilder
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My wife and I water color, paint water colors.
~Gene Wilder
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I'm not from Hollywood, and I'm also not one of the people who wants to do a tell-all, and I hate tell-alls. I didn't want to tell all.
~Gene Wilder
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What I learned from Mel Brooks was audacity - in performance as in life. Maybe you go too far, but try it.
~Gene Wilder
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I feel very Jewish, and I feel very grateful to be Jewish. But I don't believe in God or anything to do with the Jewish religion.
~Gene Wilder
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I had a daughter and lost her a long while ago. That's too sad a story to go into.
~Gene Wilder
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And in 'Frisco Kid' and in 'The Woman in Red' I had to ride badly. Then you have to really ride well in order to ride badly.
~Gene Wilder
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I want to do what I can lend my talents to, but I want it to be as a human being and not as a two-dimensional character.
~Gene Wilder
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Sidney Poitier was directing a film called 'Hanky Panky.' And he said, 'Do you want to come with me to New York to see Gilda Radner in 'Lunch Hour' on Broadway? I said, 'I don't need to see her, I love her. I've wanted to write something for her for a long time. So it's OK by me.'
~Gene Wilder
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I'm an actor, not a clown.
~Gene Wilder
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I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.
~Gene Wilder
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My mother was suffering every day of her life, and what right did I have to be happy if she was suffering? So whenever I got happy about something, I felt the need to cut it off, and the only way to cut it off was to pray. 'Forgive me Lord.' For what, I didn't know.
~Gene Wilder
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I feel alone and safe in public.
~Gene Wilder
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I'm funny on camera sometimes. In life, once in a while. Once in a while.
~Gene Wilder
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When I'm not working on something, I seem to go through periods of depression. It helps to keep busy.
~Gene Wilder
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I like writing books. I'd rather be at home with my wife. I can write, take a break, come out, have a glass of tea, give my wife a kiss, and go back in and write some more. It's not so bad. I am really lucky.
~Gene Wilder
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We all grew up on movies with scenes where the actor is lying, and you know he's lying, but he wants to make sure you know it's a lie, and so he overacts and all but winks at you, and everybody in the world except for the girl he's talking to knows he's lying.
~Gene Wilder
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I'm stopped by mothers who say, 'Mr. Wilder, what advice would you give to my young boy? He's really talented.'
~Gene Wilder
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I don't like giving speeches. It makes me nervous.
~Gene Wilder
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I trust if your life is right, the right things will happen at the right time. If the chords are in harmony inside, I think other things will happen in the same way. That sounded highfalutin' to me once, but I believe it now.
~Gene Wilder
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I'd like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn't know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.
~Gene Wilder
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I've become pretty philosophical about a lot of things, including death. It doesn't get to me.
~Gene Wilder
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My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.
~Gene Wilder
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I was a milksop as a kid. I had no confidence, no guts. I felt I was going to be someone else someday - someone who didn't have my weaknesses.
~Gene Wilder
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A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things; you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.'
~Gene Wilder
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I've read everything printed in English that Freud has written. It helped me a great deal.
~Gene Wilder
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I live in a small town in Connecticut, and they don't write scripts there, but I get them anyway because my agent is in Los Angeles.
~Gene Wilder
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I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.
~Gene Wilder
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I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have another chance if you want it. You know, if we - if this isn't going well, you can't say - well, you could say - let's stop. Let's start over again, Gene, because you were too nervous.
~Gene Wilder
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What do actors really want? To be great actors? Yes, but you can't buy talent, so it's best to leave the word 'great' out of it. I think to be believed, onstage or onscreen, is the one hope that all actors share.
~Gene Wilder
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When your mother gives you confidence about anything that you do, you carry that confidence with you.
~Gene Wilder
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I said something really stupid once. I told a friend that my mother was so beautiful, but my dad was ugly. My dad heard it and just laughed it off, but I felt guilty. It haunted me for years. I should never have said that.
~Gene Wilder
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I had a unique form: a Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
~Gene Wilder
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Actors fall into this trap if they missed being loved for who they really were and not for what they could do - sing, dance, joke about - then they take that as love.
~Gene Wilder
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I'm in complete remission. I'm alive and well.
~Gene Wilder
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Lots of things are hard work, but I think writing, for me, after I started acting at 13 years old. I like writing now much more than I do acting only because, well, partly because the scripts that are offered are junk.
~Gene Wilder
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When I was in desperate trouble for maybe eight or nine years, I went to a neuropsychiatrist.
~Gene Wilder
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I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track.
~Gene Wilder
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I didn't want to be a comedian. I wanted to be an actor - maybe a comic actor, but a real actor - by real, I mean not a comedian. I wanted to be an actor.
~Gene Wilder
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Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!
~Gene Wilder
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If something comes along that's really good, and I think I would be good for it, I'd be happy to do it. But not too many came along. I mean, they came along for the first, I don't know, 15, 18 films, but I didn't do that many. But then I didn't want to do the kind of junk I was seeing.
~Gene Wilder
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My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.
~Gene Wilder
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I'm not so funny. Gilda was funny. I'm funny on camera sometimes. In life, once in a while. Once in a while. But she was funny. She spent more time worrying about being liked than anything else.
~Gene Wilder
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If my mother hadn't laughed at the funny things I did, I probably wouldn't be a comic actor. After she had her first heart attack, the doctor said, 'Try to make her laugh.' And that was the first time I tried to make anyone laugh.
~Gene Wilder
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Mel Brooks is one of the few authentic geniuses working in comedy in America today.
~Gene Wilder
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I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track. But yes, I don't like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it.
~Gene Wilder
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The thing I love about making movies is the peace of mind that I know I don't have to be perfect the first time. I can be perfect the second time or the third time.
~Gene Wilder
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There seems to be a pattern. I get one good script every two years.
~Gene Wilder
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I know a lot of sad people who aren't comedians.
~Gene Wilder
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Pride is not the worst of sins. In fact, it's one of the most interesting ones.
~Gene Wilder
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I don't want to do 'Hamlet.' I don't want to do Robert Redford roles or Mel Gibson roles or Kevin Costner roles, because I'm not going to be good at them.
~Gene Wilder
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I never thought of it as God. I didn't know what to call it. I don't believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them.
~Gene Wilder
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I'm not a natural writer like, let's say - I'm not talking about Arthur Miller; that's a whole other thing - but let's say Woody Allen. But the more I've written, the more I've found that there is a deep well in me somewhere that wants to express things that I'm not going to find unless I write them myself.
~Gene Wilder
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