Quotes from Douglas Sirk

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The angles are the director's thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.