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

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.

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.

There is no freedom without bravery.

The folly and wisdom of men starts when they stop thinking and start acting.

There’s no such thing as ugly.

Trust your weapon, it is almost certainly smarter than you are. Remember this and you may yet live.

A very simple bad decision is to get into debt. And that is very expensive.

Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.

There's nothing wrong with being an anarchist.

The world's politics are in turmoil, not to mention the Mideast, where the US has mounted attacks from Libya to Iraq to Syria, and ISIS is attacking governments in today's pipeline rivalry.

The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it.

Why do I get the feeling that if you give me a hard time, I'll tell all of our year-mates your family nickname is Meathead?