These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.

You have to think with the heart.

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

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.

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.