Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.

I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.

Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.

For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty.

Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.

I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them

Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

You have to think with the heart.