Leo McCarey

He is responsible for the original teaming of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, though Hal Roach claimed it later and is now sometimes erroneously given credit.
According to director Edward Dmytryk, who worked for him as an editor, McCarey never forgot a slight. He once told Dmytryk that early in his career Paramount had humiliated him by unceremoniously throwing him off the lot the moment a picture he was making for them was completed. After he became successful Paramount hired him for several more pictures, but McCarey got his revenge, he told Dmytryk, because "every picture I make for Paramount costs them a half-million more than it should".
He accused Cary Grant of ripping off his persona while shooting The Awful Truth (1937), saying that the star's style and personality was just like his. McCarey and Grant worked together several times after that but never fully extinguished their long-standing antagonism resulting from McCarey's comments.
He believed that Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) was his finest film.
Orson Welles said of the film Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), "It would make a stone cry", and rhapsodized about his enthusiasm for the film in his book-length series of interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, "This Is Orson Welles".

You can really call Irene Dunne 'The First Lady of Hollywood', because she's the first real lady Hollywood has ever seen.
[on accepting his Best Director Oscar for The Awful Truth (1937)] Thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.
I don't know what my formula is. I only know I like my characters to walk in clouds. I like a little bit of the fairy tale. Let others photograph the ugliness of the world. I don't want to distress people.
I love when people laugh. I love when they cry, I like a story to say something, and I hope the audience feels happier leaving the theatre than when it came in.
[on Cary Grant whom he directed in three films] I still don't know what makes him tick. Of the sixteen hours a day when he's awake I don't think there are twenty minutes when he is not complaining. I've never seen a man more constantly in turmoil.