There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can't reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections

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.

God works in mysterious ways but at least he works, he's never on welfare in a mysterious way.

My main task as an artist is to show you either what you have never seen before -- or to show you what you have seen countless times, in a way you've never seen it.

There is always a moment in any kind of struggle when one feels in full bloom. Vivid. Alive. One might be blown to bits in such a moment and still be at peace.

I don't care about the money. I just need, as an actor, to do as many different things that I can to make me feel good about myself.

As for you, you are alive. But it's not the same as living.

I don't want to leave skiing early. I want to feel like I've done everything I can do.

I am destined to proclaim the message, unmindful of personal consequences to myself.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.

The key to success isn't just thinking about what we are doing but doing something about what we are thinking.