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

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.

Clearly, border security has been the top domestic issue of the year, and rightly so. Securing our borders is an essential aspect of our national security.

It is never acceptable for us to be the cause of any child to feel unloved or worthless.

I was born in Seoul, South Korea; then I moved to New York City at the age of seventeen. In New York, I studied art and photography. I thought I would be a painter; then I saw Walker Evans when I was in college, and that had a great impact on me. Being in the darkroom making B&W prints was such a magical experience.

I want to, at the end of the day, be able to say, 'I am a runner.'

When you advise any person you should be guided by the fear of God.

If you start to find that kind of luxury as a normal thing, you don't belong in the real world.

Football can generate excitement and bring people together.

I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.

Recklessness is par for the course when you're 25.

For 'Around the World in 80 Plates' we got to travel all over, having what was like a cross between a culinary competition and races. And in each country we had a chef Ambassador. We went to London, Barcelona, Bologna, Hong Kong, Thailand, Morocco... It was amazing.

People making it like I sit there and eat a whole plate of candy before I play a basketball game. I don't think anyone could do that.

You're either ghetto or you're not.

Getting to the point where I was ready to write a book has been about a 20-year journey of being, really honestly, too afraid to try - which I think is pretty common for people who are trying to write a large piece of fiction.

There are no kinder, more generous, more welcoming, more hospitable people in America than in the 92 counties of Indiana.

It's in the vein, somewhere in a cross between The Beatles, Cheap Trick, The Stones, Badfinger, you know, but it's not retro at all. But it is very pop.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

Life isn't perfect, of course, but we all know it's how you react to things that counts.

Estee Lauder cologne. Sam Cooke always wore it, and I started wearing it because he wore it.

I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc.