Douglas Sirk Quotes

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.

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.

I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.

You have to think with the heart.

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.

Your camera is the best critic there is. Critics never see as much as the camera does. It is more perceptive than the human eye.

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

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

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. But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them

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.

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.

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.

Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.

I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.

If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.

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

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.

Yes, I was hired by Universal because they needed a comedy director. They had seen Scandal and liked it. I saw an opportunity even in those comedies to begin my project of American films.

Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.

I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.

And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.

At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.

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

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.