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

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.

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.

My idea at this time, which was slowly developing, was to create a comedie humaine with little people, average people - samples from every period in American life.

Abortions are never seen as a positive thing, as any other operation to remedy a potentially life-ruining condition would.

Oh, wonderful. I killed his father. He hates me. He knows how to make bombs. Come on, Wedge, how does this story end?

It took a little time to get where I wanted. It took a little time to get free. It took a little time to be honest. It took a little time to be me.

Just as you can't become a marathon runner by watching marathons on TV, likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.

A good journalistic organisation upholds four values: inform, reflect, crusade, connect.

I think sometimes the critics want me to beat people down, and that's not in me. I want to lift people up.

Let's put the safety and security of the American people first.

Every love song I write is for Linda.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

I always see these landscapes in my dreams, and feel happy. I desperately try to transform these dreams into artwork, so that even while napping, I construct and reconstruct various images.