If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.

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.

Twitter's designed to reduce the language, directly out of 1984! It's Ingsoc!

I think life's too complex to be an accident.

“How ever did you see that?” “Because I looked for it.”

Even a tourist can tell in a Roman street that he is in something and not outside of something as he would be in most cities. In Rome to go out is to go home.

We represent our constituents. And so they don't get to dictate policy.

And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.

I try not to repeat myself. It's the hardest thing in the world to do -- there are only so many notes one human being can master. .

Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down.

To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I'm a big fan of kung fu movies and I'm learning kung fu for a long time.