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.

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

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 completely different. They were completely Art-less.

The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.

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

Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered.

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

At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.

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.

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 optical reason.

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 to begin my project of American films.

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 condition.

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

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

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 think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

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

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.

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

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.

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 American life.

You have to think with the heart.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Johnny Winter is one of the best blues players in the world. He's very underrated.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Well concerning the world records that I did, I think it helps a lot to me, yeah. I think it's a very individual thing because I heard some people say, like, oh I don't like it at all. But I definitely, for me it really made a big difference.

Christians should never fail to sense the operation of an angelic glory. It forever eclipses the world of demonic powers, as the sun does a candle's light.

I do believe there are leaders who are like lightning and they come along and they lead. The Lincolns of the world, the Alexander the Greats, they do exist. They have existed.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.

Most fathers don't see the war within the daughter, her struggles with conflicting images of the idealized and flawed father, her temptation both to retreat to Daddy's lap and protection and to push out of his embrace to that of beau and the world beyond home.

Scientific corporations might well become almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world - a world which would be less and less able to judge what the experiments were about.

To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

The world has fundamentally changed. It fundamentally changed when the Berlin Wall came down and the 'evil empire' ceased to exist. We are engaged around the world whether we like it or not.

I think having eight kids evens things out a bit. You learn about the world; you learn about the world; you learn you've got to get along. We're all - if anything - very adjustable.

The bravest sight in the world is to see a great man struggling against adversity.

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.

The world remains ever the same.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.