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 ….

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..

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 ….

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something compl….

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

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….

You have to think with the heart..

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 S….

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

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 ….

I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart..

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

My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in ….

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 qu….

These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent con….

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

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..

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

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 steep….

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