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

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

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

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 ….

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….

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

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

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….

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….

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….

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..

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

You have to think with the heart..

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

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 ….

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is..

If I couldn't read, I couldn't live..

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do..

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an o….

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….