Gene Wilder Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

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.

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.

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.

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.

I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track.

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.

I'm funny on camera sometimes. In life, once in a while. Once in a while.

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.

I'm in complete remission. I'm alive and well.

I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

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.

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.

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.

I love the art of acting, and I love film, because you always have anther 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.

Just watching them wrestle . . . they have that aura about them. They've been there, they know what is going on and they know how to take charge. They will be tough for any of us to defeat.

What is essential is invisible to the eye,

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.'This was said by gene wilder ... what does it mean ?

Gene Wilder characters wanted to be calm, but to the great delight of audiences, they rarely succeeded.

Gene Wilder often said that his job as an actor wasn't to make something funny but to make it real.

But the acting process - create a human being - was real, not only to the audience, but real to me.

On screen, Gene Wilder could often be summed up as an accident waiting to happen, that frizzy, flyaway hair, the eyes darting this way and that and then something would set him off, Zero Mostel, say, in the movie that made Wilder a star, "The Producers."

Woody makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic, or political.

I want to be an actor, maybe a comic actor but a real actor.

I was so afraid to feel free to enjoy my own life if my mother was sick and suffering everyday of her's. I didn't think I had the right.

I'm not very funny in real life. I used to want to be a comedian when I was 13, 14, 15, till I saw "Death Of A Salesman" with Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock.

Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?

I like - it's not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that.

In fact, [Gene Wilder] had made a hysteric seem considerably less funny in his film debut as a terrified undertaker in "Bonnie And Clyde." And neurotics soon became his stock-in-trade, whether he was playing the weird title character in "Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory..."

Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?

I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That's what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn't funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

When you please your mother by doing something, it gives you confidence that you can please other people.

To match the shoes with the jacket is fey. To match the shoes with the hat is taste.

Little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous.

The big catalyst was seeing my sister, when I was 11, doing a dramatic recital. When I saw her on the stage and everyone listening to her so patiently, quietly, that's all I wanted: for someone to look at me and listen to me, but in some beautiful and artistic way.

If the physical thing you're doing is funny, you don't have to act funny while doing it...Just be real and it will be funnier

Dont put the sheep on the table.

On stage or in the movies I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it'll last.

If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?

A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.This was said by gene wilder ... what does it mean ?

What did you expect? Welcome, sonny? Make yourself at home? Marry my daughter? You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons

For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius!

So shines a good deed... in a weary world.

I never used to believe in fate. I used to think you make your own life and then you call it fate. That's why I call it irony.

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple

As they say in Corsica... Goodbye

Time is a precious thing. Never waste it.