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 considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.

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.

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.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.