Douglas Sirk Quotes

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"I didn't think I could continue to do the melodrama as I had done in Germany. I couldn't know how it would go over with audiences here."

"I knew Law, and I knew theater. I didn't, of course, know American law, and in America the theater did not exist, except for Broadway."

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

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

"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 worked for UFA as a set designer, you know."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Now in theory, if there is no straight line in the universe, this has its effect on art. Art must consist of something bent, something curved."

"Only on Thunder did I have a producer who was interfering with my work. He was the only one at Universal. After that film I believe they fired him."

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