I was making films about American society, and it is true that I never felt at home there, except perhaps when my wife and I lived on a farm in the San Fernando Valley.

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 couldn’t read, I couldn’t live.

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.

A director in Hollywood in my time couldn’t do what he wanted to do.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't think I could continue to do the melodrama as I had done in Germany. I couldn't know how it would go over with audiences here.