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

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.

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

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.

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

You have to think with the heart.

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