No, I was not born with a monocle in my eye.

I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first.

I used to think then that I was Bohemian, but I know now that I am not. I prefer order and precision to untidiness and looseness.

Nothing seems to come up to your expectations. But nothing I had heard about Hollywood was enough.

For me, half the joy of achieving has been the struggle and the fight, the pitting myself against the world and all its competition - and winning.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.