Gene Wilder > Quotes

“If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?”
― Gene Wilder

“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple”
― Gene Wilder

“As they say in Corsica... Goodbye”
― Gene Wilder

“Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“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”
― Gene Wilder

“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”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“It's difficult to continue loving someone who shits on you.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“Climbing hills was never one of my great ambitions. Perhaps I was just lazy, but I admit--now that I've been climbing a hill every other day--that it's very difficult to think about the stresses in your life while you're trying to avoid falling backwards when a goat with large horns is chasing you because you came too close to the little patch of grass he was planning to eat for breakfast.”
― Gene Wilder, The Woman Who Wouldn't

“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

“dont put the sheep on the table”
― gene wilder

“After a while you learn
the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul and you learn that
love doesn’t mean leaning
and company doesn’t always mean security. And you begin to learn
that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises and you begin to accept your defeats
with your head up and your eyes ahead
with the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child and you learn
to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow’s ground is too uncertain for plans
and futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight. After a while you learn that even sunshine burns
if you get too much. So you plant your own garden
and decorate your own soul
instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure,
that you really are strong
and you really do have worth. and you learn
and you learn
with every good-bye you learn.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“We must deal with our failures just as well as our successes, with quiet dignity and grace”
― Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein: A Novel

“When I was eight years old, my mother had her first heart attack. After my father brought her home from the hospital, her fat heart specialist came to see how she was doing. He visited with her for about ten minutes, and then, on his way out of the house, he grabbed my right arm, leaned his sweaty face against my cheek, and whispered in my ear, “Don’t ever argue with your mother—you might kill her.” I didn’t know what to make of that, except that I could kill my mother if I got angry with her. The other thing he said was: “Try to make her laugh.” So I tried. It was the first time I ever consciously tried to make someone laugh.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“When we got back to my room, Gilda gave the dog a bowl of water and set some newspaper down in the bathroom for her to pee on. After that was taken care of, I ordered the cheesecake and coffee that Gilda said she has a yen for, and then we continues talking. Sparkle didn’t make a sound — no barking or winning or heaving breathing — she just sat on the floor and looked at the two of us. It must have been strange for her. She was a year old and had been taken from a farm by a stranger, put on an airplane, driven in a limousine, and then hugged and kissed by another stranger. Even when the doorbell rang, she didn’t bark. I thought perhaps she wasn’t able to bark. The waiter brought in the cheesecake and  poured out some coffee for us. When Gilda and I started eating the cheesecake, we heard a little peep form Sparkle. She sounded more like a bird than a dog — a very polite bird — but it was obvious that she wanted her share of cheesecake, which Gilda gave her. So the three of us polished off the cheesecake — “One piece, three forks, please.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“I think to be believed—onstage or on-screen—is the one hope that all actors share. Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn’t yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“Making Young Frankenstein was the happiest I’d ever been on a film.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“I’m not a disciplinarian. I understand the need for discipline, of course, but I’m just not good at it. I’m not talking about hitting—I don’t think any parent should ever hit a child—but about setting the rules and sticking by them. How to punish without taking away love—that’s the great art. I wished that I could do it, but I was trapped by the most ironic dichotomy: I was afraid that if I set rules and drew lines and enforced discipline, Katie would take her love away from me.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“I found out that Willy Wonka had failed at the box office. It seems strange now to think that Roald Dahl’s morality story wasn’t embraced. I was told that many mothers thought the lessons in the movie were too cruel for children to understand. As the years since have proven, children don’t have any trouble understanding the movie—they crave to know what the boundaries are. It was the mothers who had a little difficulty.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“I covered all topics—everything and everyone whom I could possibly have wronged, including God, of course—and I asked for forgiveness. But in another part of my brain, I was screaming, “FORGIVENESS FOR WHAT?” I had no idea, but the strength of that absurdity couldn’t pierce the armor of my compulsion. When I finished praying, I got up and walked home. My mother, my father, and my pregnant sister, Corinne, were all waiting in the living room, dressed in their robes. From the expression on their faces, I thought that someone had died. My mother started crying. My father spoke first: “We called the police—they just left here. Do you know what time it is? It’s three o’clock in the morning! Where were you? What in God’s name were you doing?” I couldn’t bring myself to say, “I was praying, Daddy—I was lying in a field, praying to God to forgive me.” And if he had said, “Forgive you for WHAT?” I would have said, “I don’t know!” and he would have say, “For eight hours? Are you nuts?” . . . and he would have been right.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“Gilda, if your marriage is so bad why don’t you get out of it?” “I’m afraid to be alone.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“if the thing you’re doing is really funny, you don’t need to “act funny” while doing it.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“If Columbia Pictures had not succumbed to Richard’s demands, and if I were a cocky, son-of-a-bitch movie star, and if Sidney Poitier had not held in his rage, there would have been no Stir Crazy. For the sake of my psychological health, I should have let out my anger at the time that I was angry. From the point of view of getting the picture made—I’m glad I didn’t. The picture was a great success.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“When I walked out of the movie theater I started thinking about my second-grade teacher, Miss Bernard, who used to put up paintings from almost all of the other boys and girls in my class on the classroom walls—paintings that she considered worthy—but she never put up one of mine. She never told me why or gave me an encouraging word, but I got the message: “You’re no good at art, Jerry.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“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

“Across three thousand miles of sea and through strange England’s smiling, and into a wee Scots Highland town there is a lad who’s crying. Oh fool the world, he could, he could, a man at twenty years . . . but all alone in that Highland town there is a boy in tears.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“I’m always lonely when I’m on my own—a leftover I think from the Demon, who always struck when I was alone—but towards the end of filming I realized that I was going to be lonelier when I returned to my home and family.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“then I took out a notepad and wrote my first poem. Across three thousand miles of sea and through strange England’s smiling, and into a wee Scots Highland town there is a lad who’s crying. Oh fool the world, he could, he could, a man at twenty years . . . but all alone in that Highland town there is a boy in tears.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“Maybe the Demon forced his way in because it was this particular play. As I waited for my cue, I kept thinking that I could shut him out in plenty of time . . . but I couldn’t; the fear of not praying overpowered me, even though it was a matter of seconds before my entrance. I saw both the play and my brain falling apart. Then, somehow, the obligation to the audience and Arthur Miller and my memory of Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock became more important to me than God. I heard my cue, said my first line . . . and I was safe for the remainder of the play. Years after that, I still carried the inexplicable conviction that once I stepped onto the stage, they couldn’t get me (whoever the hell “they” were) and that I was safe . . . so long as the curtain was up.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“MARGIE: You want to know if she’ll survive? She’ll survive! Living with someone who doesn’t want to be there would do more harm.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

“There is one strange irony that I haven’t told you. One April afternoon, three weeks before she died, Gilda walked up to me in our living room and said, “I have a title for you, ‘Kiss Me Like a Stranger’ . . . maybe you can use it some day.” I had no idea why she said it or what the title meant; I just thanked her.”
― Gene Wilder, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art