How does one make a movie about decadence these days? Now that we're allowed to do it, it's too late.

The best comedy is always heartless, an alternative to rational emotion.

His interviewing self is, or was, an extra person, like the Holy Ghost, generated by self-contemplation.

In modern American style, his job, not his past, defined him.

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

My people are American, my time is today:music must repeat the thought and aspirations of the times.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.