Hitchcock Quotes

“There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“We all go a little mad sometimes.”
― Robert Bloch, Psycho

“The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea.”
― Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard: Critical Writings

“Content, I am not interested in that at all. I don't give a damn what the film is about. I am more interested in how to handle the material so as to create an emotion in the audience. I find too many people are interested in the content. If you were painting a still life of some apples on a plate, it's like you'd be worrying whether the apples were sweet or sour. Who cares?”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“Žižek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious—one never does that.”
― Fredric Jameson

“I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“Je me sentais vaguement épuisée et me demandai, un peu choquée de ma cruauté, pourquoi les personnes âgées étaient si exténuantes. Pires que les jeunes enfants [...] car il fallait se montrer poli.”
― Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca

“Staying relaxed was helping him cope with the drug induced juddering vision that could be best described as being like a Hitchcockian visual effect operated by a hyperactive squirrel that shook the whole universe closer and farther away. If you went with it, it was quite pleasant, as long as you didn't introduce any lateral movement like turning your head or the car. This caused the universe to try and slide away from underneath you. The other side effect was the constant feeling you ought to try to twist your head off, in a good way.”
― Dylan Perry, Gods Just Want To Have Fun

“Readers of the book, paradoxically, will have a different kind of surprise in store for them: What many "Vertigo" aficionados will find perplexing are the systematic, businesslike, matter of fact circumstances under which this odd, obsessional, very un-matter-of-fact film was created.”
― Dan Auiler, Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic

“The life of a painter demands solitude”
― Robert Bloch, The Creeper in the Crypt

“François Truffault: Mr. Hitchcock, you were born in London on August 13, 1899. The only thing I know about your childhood is the incident at the police station. Is that story true?


Alfred Hitchcock: Yes, it is. I must have been about four or five years old. My father sent me to the police station with a note. The chief of police read it and locked me in a cell for five to ten minutes, saying, "This is what we do to naughty boys.”
― François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut

“In all the time I've spent making cinema I'd have to say my favorite experience was shooting Rope with Jimmy Stewart.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“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