What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.

The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

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

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.

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.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

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.