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

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.

I love to win. But probably equal to that - I love doing what I do.

My career in the movie business began in Hong Kong, my heart has always been tied to Asia, and it is immensely gratifying to see international recognition for Asian cinema as a whole.

One has to look at my life story to see what I've done. I've paid a heavy price that many people don't realize.

As we are all aware, Special Operations Forces, SOF, are playing an increasingly essential role as we continue to fight and, more importantly, win the war on terror.

You can be fat and love yourself. You can be fat and have a great damn personality. You can be fat and sew your own clothes. But you can't be fat and healthy.

The welfare state is collapsing all around us. There are people that realize that we can't go on this way, but I'm not sure how many people realize how close we are to the collapse of the U.S. financial system.

Winning is a serious matter.

The film-school mantra is that if you don't tell your own stories, nobody will.

I'm not a huge musical fan. It's like when people just jump out singing; it's not real.

Six innings, you're doing your job. That's a good target to have, but I'm always looking to improve. There's three more innings of improvement left.

Nobody asked you to flip burgers for the rest of your life.

We live in secular world now, but most of our art and culture is rooted in religion.

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing.

To think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.

My whole approach to wardrobe is, throw it in a suitcase and make sure they don't press it, for Pete's sake, so I can try to display some rumpled charm. Actually, I'm just a pig. I've got coffee stains on my pants. I think they're coffee stains, anyway.

There is nothing more frightening than active ignorance.

No, I always felt that amongst my core fans- because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mid '80s that was sort of a bump on the scale- they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work.

When I started travelling, I would go to a city and be on television and I used to get the question, 'Why do you work? If I were you, I'd just go and lie on a beach somewhere.' And I'd answer, 'Well, I wanted to make something of my life.'

I had never watched a law show prior to being cast on The Practice.