Douglas Sirk Quotes

32 quotes in 458 categories

• 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…
• I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.
• 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…
• I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.
• This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is…
• 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.…
• 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…
• There arose a belief in style - and in banality. Banality encompassed politics, too, because it was a common belief that politics were not worthy…
• 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,…
• Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.
• Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.
• In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
• 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…
• 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…
• A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.
• At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.
• I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.
• I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.
• If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.
• Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.

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