A biography for Douglas Sirkhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“And in movies you must be a gambler. To produce films is to gamble.”
“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.”
“A director in Hollywood in my time couldn't do what he wanted to do.”
“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 never regarded my pictures as very much to be proud of, except in this, the craft, the style.”
“Rock Hudson was not an educated man, but that very beautiful body of his was putty in my hands.”
“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.”
“If I couldn't read, I couldn't live.”
“You have to think with the heart.”
“Your characters have to remain innocent of what your picture is after.”
“I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.”
“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.”
“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.”
“At the same time, of course, Marxism arose - Rosa Luxembourg, Leninism, anarchism - and art became political.”
“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.”
“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 considered that the homes that people live in exactly describe their lives.”