Douglas Sirk

“A film is written in the camera.”

“The emotions are the real thing in my pictures.”

“The happy ending is the saddest of all endings.”

“Cinema is blood, tears, and violence.”

“The story is just a coat hanger for the emotions.”

“Life is the cheapest bargain in the world. You get it for nothing.”

“A director's philosophy is not in his words, it's in his work.”

“What I’m showing is a society in which the pursuit of happiness is in the Constitution, but it is not there for the taking.”

“I wanted to make pictures about people, not about ideas.”

“The mirror is the filmmaker's reality.”

“You can't have a tragedy without a sense of distance.”

“The surface of things is the first thing you have to deal with. And you cannot get away from it.”

“I have always looked on the cinema as a pulpit.”

“The angle is the director's moral statement.”