Alfred Hitchcock Quotes - Page 2

Actually, I have no regard for money. Aside from its purchasing power, it's completely useless as far as I'm concerned.

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.'

Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house.

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.

I always try to look at things as though I were remembering them three years later.

Self-plagiarism is style.

Our primary function is to create an emotion and our secondary function is to sustain that emotions.

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.

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.

Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement and, occasionally, a hearty meal.

Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime.

The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema

I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.

A woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing doesn't want to go to the movies to watch a film about a woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing.

The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.

A woman, I always say, should be like a good suspense movie: The more left to the imagination, the more excitement there is. This should be her aim - to create suspense, to let a man discover things about her without her having to tell him.

I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe?

For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.

Everything's perverted in a different way.

In films murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and what a messy thing it is to kill a man.

I've become a body of films, not a man, I am all those films.

Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.