Everybody thought New York was this hard, cruel place, and I found it to be an extraordinarily wonderful place filled with the most interesting people.

Movie narration in the forties was radically different than the narrative involved in books.

People who go for humor are wonderful because they do great humor. People who go for wit and end up with humor are people who have made a mistake.

I couldn't sit down and write a novel or a short story - even now - because of my dyslexia. But I learned narration through movies.

In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.

The thing I loved the most about being art director was picking the photographers and working with them.

After the war, photography came alive, in part because everybody started to use the 35mm camera, and worked on the street instead of in a studio, and that made an enormous difference in not only how photographs looked, but what they were about.