In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.

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.

If you were a bird, and lived on high, You'd lean on the wind when the wind came by, You'd say to the wind when it took you away:"That's where I wanted to go today!

When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.

Setting boundaries isn't an alternative to loving your child. It is a means of loving her.

If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.

I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.

I just go where the guitar takes me.

People don't fall in love so easily. So they don't hate so easily, either.

If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries.

A thick stick in one's hand makes people respectful.

Cautious age suspects the flattering form, and only credits what experience tells.