Alfred Hitchcock Quotes

• "A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it."
• "A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake."
• "Actors are cattle."
• "Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."
• "Blondes make the best victims. They're like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints."
• "Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms."
• "Disney has the best casting. If he doesn't like an actor he just tears him up."
• "Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
• "For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake."
• "Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare."
• "I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach."
• "I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one."
• "I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks."
• "I have prepared one of my own timecapsules. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like."
• "I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle."
• "I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never equaled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig."
• "I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I've never tasted it."
• "I'm full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm."
• "I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them."
• "If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on."
• "In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."
• "In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man."
• "In reference to the murder scene in 'Dial M for murder': As you have seen on the screen; the best way to do it is with a scissor."
• "In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings."
• "One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedlly, as in life."
• "Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
• "Self-plagiarism is style."
• "Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table."
• "Someone once told me that every minute a murder occurs, so I don't want to waste your time, I know you want to go back to work."
• "Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs."
• "Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it."
• "Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime."
• "Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house."
• "The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder."
• "The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them."
• "The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop."
• "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it."
• "There is nothing quite so good as burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating."
• "There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever."
• "These are bagpipes. I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the man-made sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig."
• "This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid."
• "This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book - it makes a very poor doorstop."
• "We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like."
• "When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?, ' I say, 'Your salary."
• "You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer."