And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

Intellectualism came very late to America. That's why Americans are so proud of it. I found very few real intellectuals in America. But there are so many pseudo-intellectuals.

There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy of art.

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.

For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty.

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

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.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

You have to think with the heart.

Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.

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.

I figure we go through things that make us stronger, but we also go through things that just simply piss us off.

Always remember that you are an Englishman and therefore have drawn first prize in the lottery of life.

I think Lincoln had a unique parenting style. He let his kids run free and wild.

He who hath many friends hath none.

Once you do a character in Hollywood and people haven't seen you before, they put you in a box and they think that's all that you can do and it's hard to get people to take a risk on you.

Where does discipline end? Where does cruelty begin? Somewhere between these, thousands of children inhabit a voiceless hell.

A lot of times people hide their quirks when they're first getting to know a person.

Everyone can cook. If you try. If you put a little love into it.

Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

We are a nation in which freedom is alive in the squares and streets, in the daily work of the communications media, in the open relationship between the governing and the governed.