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.

Sometimes other people have better ideas.

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.

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

The greatest style is when you can't see the style though you walk away knowing it was there. It's like a perfume - there but not there.

My next film is always shaped by the last one... by the things I feel I didn't get right, or the things I like and want to try to develop further, but it always comes out of the last picture.