On Ernst Lubitsch: He could do more with a closed door than other directors could do with an open fly.

The Austrians are brilliant people. They made the world believe that Hitler was a German and Beethoven an Austrian.

An actor entering through the door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through the window, you've got a situation.

I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot-the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.

I, you know, am all over the place — every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent. I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. … I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture, so I did `Witness for the Prosecution,’ then I was bored with it, so I moved on.

A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.