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

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

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.

Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.

I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them

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

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