Douglas Sirk Quotes

Country music has become the music that best represents the reality of American life.

I think of myself as writing realist American fiction. 'Cynical but hopeful' wouldn't be the worst thing I've ever been called.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

I think comedy is the perfect vehicle for that which is slightly beyond life.

My goal is to make as many films as possible about different aspects of American life.

Different things made 'Cheers' and 'Frasier' special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.

The point about 'state-of-the-nation' novels is not that they should be about the 'state-of-the-nation', but they should be about people.

I'm just trying to make movies simply about life. Naturally, when I'm doing that, horror, violence, and all those kinds of things get mixed in. All those things happen in reality.

The United States is my subject, but as Hawthorne once wrote, "the United States are suited for many admirable purposes, but not to live in."

I think one of my very favorite films of all time was with Peter Sellers when he played Chauncey, the gardener. Being There.

My real life is funnier than anything on TV.

People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

I'm really fond of 'Real Life' because I think it anticipated a whole movement. And people forget, they talk about 'Spinal Tap,' but that wasn't... this was a mockumentary a long time before that. It was one of the early, early sort of mockumentaries.

I used to hear on the radio people like Jack Benny or Bob Hope, but I never had any interest in their type of humor. I thought that I could do something more substantially meaningful with significant, thoughtful, analytical reflections on real life situations.

I find Spike Jones' movies to be really very inventive and funny, but they're really sad and touching and really key into the different facets of the human experience.

Much of the best humor is found in the frequently tragic reality of human experience.

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

You can go through comic strips alone and study the common man. You can trace our history.

I think sometimes people can get lost in the bigger special effects, science fiction, robot stuff, and those are cool and fun to watch, too, but I think it's so important to sometimes step back and watch something that's about life and human interaction.

I think a playful critique is good for all of us, and that's basically how I see satire functioning. But I'm not interested in a kind of contemptuous satirical vision; I try always, even when I'm knowingly being satirical, to also be humane, but I mean, let's face it: there's plenty in American life to make fun of, and we all participate in it.

I think it's always a good time to be in a political film in America because there's so much material for comedy.

I think all good drama is funny. All the best drama is ultimately very funny. Life is funny. You can't have any honest treatise on life without bumping into some humor.

With Don Rickles and me, we're just telling the truth. We're not terrific people, and we're not gonna win the beauty contest. We're just average Joes. We're just being who we are, and I think people like that.

I just do jokes about real situations, pure observation.

I remember when I first saw Whoopi Goldberg doing standup, and she was wearing a sheet on her head, basically pretending to be this little white girl with long luxurious blonde hair. Everyone can relate to that. It's an oral history of black women's lives through laughter.