Quotes by Douglas Sirk

• I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.
• 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.
• You have to think with the heart.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.
• 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.
• Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.
• Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.
• 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.
• In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
• 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.
• 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.
• I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.
• I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.
• I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.
• 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.
• 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.
• At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.
• At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.
• And it really began with Einstein. We attended his lectures. Now the theory of relativity remained - and still remains - only a theory. It has not been proven. But it suggested a completely different picture of the physical world.
• And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.
• A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.
• Ross Hunter was my assistant on Take Me to Town, He was a young man, an actor before that, and learned a lot on the picture. During shooting, Goldstein left, and Ross was most pleasant. He never interfered.
• 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.