Sirk's Quotes

#1. You have to think with the heart.

Douglas Sirk

#2. 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

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

Douglas Sirk

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

Douglas Sirk

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

Douglas Sirk

#6. 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.

Douglas Sirk

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Whereas with Sirk, everything is always filmed. No matter what the script, he's always a real director.

Jacques Rivette

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

Douglas Sirk

#12. 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

#13. 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.

Douglas Sirk

#14. I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

Douglas Sirk

#15. 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

#16. The ghastly mother-in-law is well represented by a little comedy film of 1952: No Room for the Groom, directed by Douglas Sirk, the fine German director more famous for his melodramas that humanely criticize American morals and values.

Jeanine Basinger

#17. Yes, actually ever since I saw his films and tried to write about them, Sirk's been in everything I've done. Not Sirk himself, but what I've learned from his work.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

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

Douglas Sirk

#19. 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

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

Douglas Sirk

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

Douglas Sirk

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

Douglas Sirk

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. The war was the end of an era, in art as well. And we were trying to create a new philosophy.

Douglas Sirk

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

Douglas Sirk

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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.

Douglas Sirk

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

Douglas Sirk

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

Douglas Sirk

#32. Sirk was every woman's dream of a director.

Dorothy Malone

#33. At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.

Douglas Sirk

#34. 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