I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.