Douglas Sirk famous quotes

04-17-2025

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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Meaningful #Promise #Rotten
In the 19th century, you had bourgeois art without politics - an almost frozen idea of what beauty is.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Beauty #Art #Ideas
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Opportunity #Directors #Scandal
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Real #America #Pseudo Intellectuals
A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Directors #Hollywood #Wanted
At the time I belonged to the socialist party, and Hitler came to power.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Party #Socialist
I considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Home #People
I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Designer
If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.
-- Douglas Sirk
Throughout my pictures I employ a lighting which is not naturalistic.
-- Douglas Sirk
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Eye #Cameras #Doe
Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Beautiful #Men #Rocks
Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Character #Innocence #Innocent
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Dirty #Hands #Land
And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Film #Produce
You have to think with the heart.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Broken Heart #Thinking #Heart Broke
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Gone #Reason #Angle
I never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Style #Crafts #Proud
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Art #Ideas #Perfection
I think the great artists (..) have always thought with the heart.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Heart #Artist #Thinking
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Art #Distance #Quality
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
-- Douglas Sirk

#Real #Reflection #Glasses
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
-- Douglas Sirk

#Home #Character #Wife
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Art #Style #Belief
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.
-- Douglas Sirk

#Average #Ideas #People

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