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

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.

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

In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

If I can say one thing for my pictures, it is a certain craftsmanship. A thought which has gone into every angle. There is nothing there without an optical reason.

I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.

Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.