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.

  Douglas Sirk

  Art, Distance, Quality

  Douglas Sirk, Jon Halliday (1971). “Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday”, Harvill Secker

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  85 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Heart, Artist, Thinking

  7 Copy quote

• You have to think with the heart.

  Douglas Sirk

  Broken Heart, Thinking, Heart Broke

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  61 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Douglas Sirk, Lucy Fischer (1991). “Imitation of Life”, p.228, Rutgers University Press

  4 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Beautiful, Men, Rocks

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Character, Innocence, Innocent

  Douglas Sirk, Jon Halliday (1971). “Sirk on Sirk: interviews with Jon Halliday”, Harvill Secker

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  8 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Home, People

  5 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Ifs

  5 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Directors, Hollywood, Wanted

  "The Essentials: Douglas Sirk", www.indiewire.com. April 26, 2013.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Lighting

  4 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Style, Crafts, Proud

  7 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Designer, Knows

  4 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Film, Produce, Gamble

  5 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Party, Socialist Party, Socialist

  6 Copy quote

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

  Douglas Sirk

  Beauty, Art, Ideas

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Naughty, Hands

  16 Copy quote

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