A Quote by Billy Wilder
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.
Related Quotes
The policeman must be a minister, a social worker, a diplomat, a tough guy, and a gentleman. And, of course, he'd have to be a genius... For he will have to feed a family on a policeman's salary.
There is a certain justice in criticism. The critic is like a midwife - a tyrannical midwife.
Saddam was a bastard, but he was our bastard.
Vietnam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war.
A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.
It is a policeman’s duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners. But when robbery becomes the purpose of the law, and the policeman’s duty becomes, not protection, but the plunder of property - then it is an outlaw who has to become a policeman.
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.
Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.
Socrates, whose mother was a midwife, used to say that his art was like the art of the midwife. She does not herself give birth to the child, but she is there to help during its delivery. Similarly, Socrates saw his task as helping people to 'give birth' to correct insight, since real understanding must come from within. . . . Everybody can grasp philosophical truths if they just use their innate reason.
Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
Gentlemen, let's get the thing straight once and for all. The policeman isn't there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.
A policeman must know everything - and not tell. He must know where all the sin is and not partake.
I don't want to be the policeman of Lebanon. It's not the business of Israel. Israel was not created to serve as a policeman of the region.
If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner?
Working with the dying is like being a midwife for this great rite of passage of death. Just as a midwife helps a being take their first breath, you help a being take their last breath.
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