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.

There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections

If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.

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.

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

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.

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.