Douglas Sirk Quotes

"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."

"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."

"When we first came to America, I bought a tiny piece of land far out in the country. But there was no place to live on it, only a shed."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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 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."