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

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

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

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.

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

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

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.