Alfred Hitchcock Quotes

“What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“I'm a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“I said, "I don't think I can give you that kind of emotion." And he [Hitchcock] sat there and said, "Ingrid, fake it!" Well, that was the best advice I've had in my whole life, because in all the years to come there were many directors who gave me what I thought were quite impossible instructions and many difficult things to do, and just when I was on the verge of starting to argue with them, I heard his voice coming to me through the air saying, "Ingrid, fake it!" It saved a lot of unpleasant situations and waste of time.”
― Ingrid Bergman

“Brandon, until this very moment, the world and the people in it have always been dark and incomprehensible to me, and I've tried to clear my way with logic and superior intellect, and you've thrown by own words right back in my face; you've given my words a meaning that I never dreamed of, and you tried to twist them into a cold logical excuse for your ugly murder!

Tonight you've made me ashamed of every concept I've ever had, of superior or inferior beings, but I thank you for that shame, because now I know that we're each of us a separate human being, Brandon, with the right to live and work and think as individuals, but with an obligation to the society that we live in. By what right do you dare say that there's a superior few to which you belong? By what right did you dare decide that that boy in there [he's referencing the dead body of "David," lying in a trunk in the middle of the room] was inferior and therefore could be killed?

Did you think you were God Brandon? Is that what you thought when you choked the life out of him? Is that what you thought when you served food from his grave! I don't know what you thought or what you are, but I know what you've done—YOU'VE MURDERED! You've strangled the life of a fellow human being who could live and love as you never could... and never will again!”
― Arthur Laurents

“Drama is real life – with the dull parts left out.” Alfred Hitchcock”
― Marja McGraw

“Woolrich had a genius for creating types of story perfectly consonant with his world: the noir cop story, the clock race story, the waking nightmare, the oscillation thriller, the headlong through the night story, the annihilation story, the last hours story. These situations, and variations on them, and others like them, are paradigms of our position in the world as Woolrich sees it. His mastery of suspense, his genius (like that of his spiritual brother Alfred Hitchcock) for keeping us on the edge of our seats and gasping with fright, stems not only from the nightmarish situations he conjured up but from his prose, which is compulsively readable, cinematically vivid, high-strung almost to the point of hysteria, forcing us into the skins of the hunted and doomed where we live their agonies and die with them a thousand small deaths.”
― Francis M. Nevins, Night and Fear: A Centenary Collection of Stories by Cornell Woolrich

“I never make up anything. I get everything from my books. They're all true!" --Ann Newton/Shadow of a Doubt (1943)”
― rebecca hitchcock

“The Pressure Cooker by Stewart Stafford

We arrive at the sweltering park,
And disturb a larcenous squirrel,
Trash can raider with easy spoils,
He scampers away down the back.

Solo lady in the gazebo watches,
An outdoor Mrs. Bates silhouette,
As a tuft of angel hair rolls along,
I give the thirsty baby hydration.

Transfixed by a burst helium balloon,
Rocking itself to the unheard beats,
Arid breeze, now ceiling conductor,
Our squirrel pal returns to spy on us.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“To recall the extent to which Hitchcock was marked by his petit bourgeois interpellation may not radically change the way we read his films. It should, however, remind us that his British films in particular come out of a highly class-structured and class-conscious social formation and are likely to bear the traces of this, even if only in their interstices.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“Actors read lines and change their facial expressions. Even then they usually need a director to tell them how to do it. It could be argued that actors are not creators or are at best secondary creators. Actors create something from something, usually a prewritten script. Whereas sculptors will create something from the raw material of the earth only using their hands and no other tools. In this regard sculptors are higher creators than painters, and painters are higher creators than musicians or writers who use symbols and tools to create. Actors however are the lowest of all creators. Perhaps that helps to explain why Hitchcock said, “Actors should be treated as cattle.”
― Jack Freestone

“If you like the way Alfred Hitchcock built suspense—
letting unease creep in quietly—
THE DOOR might be your kind of read.”
― Eric Brown, THE DOOR: It's not locked. It's waiting.