Top 100 Hitchcock's Quotes
#1. With horror stories in general, I try and take Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock's advice and convey to the audience: Everyone has something to feel guilty about.
Chris Mentillo
#2. I didn't hang around films. I don't know if I'd ever seen Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.
Patricia Highsmith
#3. There is something particularly unique about the films of Hong Sang-soo ... it's got to do with his masterful sense of storytelling ... as the critic Manny Farber once said of Hitchcock's ROPE Hong Sang-soo's pictures unpeel like an orange.
Martin Scorsese
#4. I suddenly realized how much I loved her when we attended Alfred Hitchcock's 75th birthday party last August. There was something magical about that night, and it made me see how much she really meant to me.
Rod Taylor
#5. Being the object of Alfred Hitchcock's obsession was horrific, but while he ruined my career, he could never ruin my life.
Tippi Hedren
#6. Hitchcock's murder set-pieces are so potent, they can galvanize (and frighten) even a viewer who's seen them before!
Leonard Maltin
#7. In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.
Bruce Dern
#8. My favorite types of movies definitely aren't thrillers, but at the same time you can't deny the genius of Hitchcock's films.
Aaron Yoo
#9. June 2011 article in the Financial Times titled "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Bankers' " noted, "The characteristics that make for good traders and investment bankers are pretty much the same as those that define psychopaths."107
Thom Hartmann
#10. I had to change the shape of my own voice. It was quite hard to pull off and so once I had it, I stayed in Hitchcock's voice all day on set.
Toby Jones
#11. Great horror stories of books and movies have seemingly come from some aspect of real-life events, and human behavior. This is evident as far back as Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Psycho. The movie was based on a serial killer named, Ed Gein in Wisconsin.
Chris Mentillo
#12. The skyline in Alfred Hitchcock's 'Rope' is made up: no, you don't get the Waldorf and the Chrysler and the Empire State buildings and a dozen other magnificent structures in one window.
Bill Buford
#13. I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful.
Paul Haggis
#14. In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.
Alfred Hitchcock
#15. 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.'
Alfred Hitchcock
#16. It's still there- my own heart, cobbled together and a little worse for wear- but it's definitely not all beat out.
Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
#17. Lesson Number One in Everworld: There's them, and there's us. And any day we can keep them from destroying us, that's a victory.
Katherine Applegate
#18. 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.
Alfred Hitchcock
#19. They know you're not Alfred Hitchcock, but you need to be enough Alfred Hitchcock for them not to be bothered by it. That's a reassuring thing.
Toby Jones
#20. Just as with a guitar, you can improvise a guitar solo, and they'd probably be similar each time, but they won't be exactly the same. With the word, it's probably a bit freer than that. I probably repeat myself more musically than I do verbally.
Robyn Hitchcock
#21. I could never be like Hitchcock and do only one kind of movie. Anything that's good is worthwhile.
Robert Zemeckis
#22. There are too many games now where there's too much structure and not enough of the chaos.
Ken Hitchcock
#23. The prosthetics were interesting because the artist was so good that they could just put a Hitchcock mask on me, but you don't want to do that. You're an actor playing Hitchcock, so it's about how much of that you're going to do.
Toby Jones
#24. American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg.
Dennis Etchison
#25. I feel very strongly that a film isn't just a story, but the WAY that a story is told. It's why I am such a great fan of Hitchcock because it really is all in the filmmaking.
Larry Fessenden
#26. I thin many people's deviant behavior starts with dreams because dreams are so non-linear ... as if there's an assumption that everything has to be linear or has to be plotted.
Robyn Hitchcock
#27. Sometimes you can be inserted into another person's life just by witnessing something you were never really supposed to be a part of.
Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock
#28. This weapon [an ax] is primitive but effective. And it's also guaranteed to be fifty-percent painless. You see, it takes two people to operate, and the person at this end [the handle] doesn't feel a thing.
Alfred Hitchcock
#29. Suspicion," he said. "Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. He's a genius." "Starring Cary Grant." When Lucas gave me a look, I added, "You have your priorities, I have mine.
Claudia Gray
#30. Hitchcock used to believe that if there were three or four memorable scenes in a film that would be enough to drive it, but I don't know if that's true or not.
Clint Eastwood
#31. One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards, which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It's why he found shooting on set boring - because he had already composed the film in his head.
Camille Paglia
#32. I am not like Hitchcock, directing the reaction of the public or the audience. I don't like that. I think this is some kind of fascism - 'You need to react like that.' No. No. It's not like this; everyone needs to react as he can.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#33. Oh God, modern life with all its feelings ... We live in the most callous society ever, and all anybody talks about nowadays is getting in touch with their feelings ... The world has become one enormous group therapy session. It's a terrible bore. My motto is, 'Thank you for not sharing!
Jane Stanton Hitchcock
#34. It's much more interesting to try and understand what binds two people together. why we stay with each other is much more of a mystery than why we don't.
Jane Stanton Hitchcock
#35. For me, suspense doesn't have any value if it's not balanced by humor.
Alfred Hitchcock
#36. Too many people believe in that [Alfred] Hitchcock thing that he only shot exactly the shots he needed for the dialogue he needed and I think that's bullshit, even if that was true for that singular filmmaker.
Jason Reitman
#38. There's something in the rhythm and roll of it that is connected to the way Hitchcock thinks and moves. Then there is everything he ingested - the cigar smoking and drinking that's imprinted on his voice.
Toby Jones
#39. I've been able to make a good living as a musician, but now it's time to do all the other stuff.
Robyn Hitchcock
#40. Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility.
Bret Easton Ellis
#41. 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.
Alfred Hitchcock
#43. You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right.
Mel Brooks
#44. Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.
Manuel Puig
#45. I became a musician because that's really what I wanted to do when I was fifteen, but I had other abilities.
Robyn Hitchcock
#46. Actually, I have no regard for money. Aside from its purchasing power, it's completely useless as far as I'm concerned.
Alfred Hitchcock
#47. Coaches are like ducks. Calm on top, but paddling underneath. Believe me, there's a lot of leg movement.
Ken Hitchcock
#48. I think Hitchcock had a thing about hills: think of the house on the hill in 'Psycho.' Then, in 'Vertigo,' Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map.
Allen Coulter
#49. My husband and I have watched a lot of Hitchcock movies in bulk, and there's a lot to be gained from that, from focusing strictly on an artists canon.
Claire Danes
#52. I make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing.
Peter Jackson
#53. The act of seeing any film generally is you knowing more than the characters, even if it's the classic Hitchcock shot of two people talking and a bomb being under the table. Part of the pleasure of it is seeing where people go wrong, and the irony of situations.
Richard Ayoade
#54. It's one of those jobs where you go, 'Oh no, I've got to play Alfred Hitchcock. I have to play him even though I know what this is going to involve.'
Toby Jones
#55. Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, 'Clint, you must remember, it's only a movie.'
Clint Eastwood
#56. It's only a movie, and, after all, we're all grossly overpaid.
Alfred Hitchcock
#57. Coming out's the hardest part, when you're Queen Elvis.
Robyn Hitchcock
#59. Television has brought back murder into the home - where it belongs.
Alfred Hitchcock
#62. Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.
David Mamet
#64. People from the past always seem to have much more time to create beautiful, intricate, delicate things that often reach the future in a kind of curled-up, capsized state.
Robyn Hitchcock
#65. I was a fan of Hitchcock, but more importantly than that, he is such an inscrutable man, and a very carefully inscrutable man. He apparently was blank-faced with a calm and controlled presence. I was immediately anxious and thought, 'How am I going to get behind that?'
Toby Jones
#66. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched. It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.
Bruno Dumont
#67. The Beatles were something everyone had in common; this was thirty years ago, there was Dr. Who and everybody knew who the Daleks were and there was The Beatles and everybody knew who George Harrison was.
Robyn Hitchcock
#68. Sometimes the shots serve as homages to other movies and other directors, like Hitchcock.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#69. I think of great masters, like [Alfred] Hitchcock, for example, who works absolutely within this sensational realm. You feel like you can always tell what temperature a room is in a Hitchcock film because the people feel alive, they don't feel like they're just being filmed on a stage.
Tilda Swinton
#73. Every sorrow is different, but you get through 'em the same way. Plenty of rest, good food, and keeping your family and friends close by." She paused a minute. "A lot of prayer doesn't hurt either.
Shannon Hitchcock
#74. We hide behind our assumptions and preconceptions as if they were fortresses - shutting people out. I love to witness the fall of a preconception; the way it renders you naked
Karen Hitchcock
#75. I can tell how I'm doing, and I can tell if the crowd is particularly dead.
Robyn Hitchcock
#77. I have a feeling that inside you somewhere,there's somebody nobody knows about
Alfred Hitchcock
#78. As soon as a norm is established, people start questioning it, which is probably a good thing in the end.
Robyn Hitchcock
#79. It's hard to imagine anyone interested in film not being a fan of Alfred Hitchcock because he's such a key influence on the entire history of cinema - it's hard to escape his shadow.
Toby Jones
#80. Gee, I'm sorry I didn't hear you in all this rain. Go ahead in, please.
Anthony Perkin's Norman Bates
Talking To Janet Leigh's Marion Crane.
Alfred Hitchcock
#82. I've never been very keen on women who hang their sex round their neck like baubles. I think it should be discovered. It's more interesting to discover the sex in a woman than it is to have it thrown at you, like a Marilyn Monroe or those types. To me they are rather vulgar and obvious.
Alfred Hitchcock
#83. I've heard that Alfred Hitchcock said that by the time he was ready to shoot a film, he didn't even want to do it any more because he'd already had all of the fun of working it out. It's the same thing with these Frank comics.
Jim Woodring
#84. Claude Jade is a brave nice young lady. But I don't give any guarantee what she will do on a taxi's back seat.
Alfred Hitchcock
#85. When you can look forward, and the road is clear ahead, and now you are going to create something - that's as happy as I'd want to be.
Alfred Hitchcock
#86. I can remember soundtracks that you just can't separate from the film - It's just so intertwined, so important. Like the Hitchcock ones where they kind of inform each other and become this larger thing as a result.
Jonny Greenwood
#87. Caesar was Rome's escape from communism. I expect no Caesar; I find on our map no Rubicon. But then I expect to see communistic madness rebuked and ended.
Roswell Dwight Hitchcock
#88. When I first started listening to music intently as a teenager, I was always sitting there with a biro or a pencil, drawing. That's how I absorbed it all.
Robyn Hitchcock
#89. A lot of films made me love the movies, everything from Hitchcock to Godard. But the ones that really grabbed me were Costa-Gavras's films like 'Z' and 'State of Siege.'
Paul Haggis
#90. Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house.
Alfred Hitchcock
#91. The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no mater what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination ... you can make feast of straw.
Jane Stanton Hitchcock
#92. People's intelligence tends to be in inverse proportion to their number. People don't tend to get smarter as they get into bigger groups.
Robyn Hitchcock
#93. There's nothing in the future and there's nothing in the past. There is only this one moment, and you've got to make it last.
Robyn Hitchcock
#94. We have a need to be religious, we need to worship, we need to build totems and shrines and icons, but nobody's sure in honor of what.
Robyn Hitchcock
#95. As a kid I watched the Academy Awards on television and always wanted one - or several - like one of my favorite directions, John Ford. He won six. On the other hand, Orson Welles, who's on the top of my list, didn't win any. Alfred Hitchcock didn't win any. Howard Hawks didn't win any.
Martin Scorsese
#96. Even in Australia I'd say 80 percent of our television was American. I grew up watching Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. I used to sit with my mum when I was just nine years old, trying to guess what the twist would be. I love that kind of thing.
Jacki Weaver
#98. That's a little homage in a way to that and also to create that sort of creepy atmosphere that Hitchcock did. Vertigo was one of his great movies that was shot right here in The City and it's about a woman and the psychological twists and so forth.
Philip Kaufman
#99. Every 20 minutes you've got to have a bump, you've got to have a change in course, you've got to unsettle the audience. It can't be too predictable so something has to happen. I think that was something that Hitchcock did very well too. You couldn't let an audience feel too settled in.
Barbara Broccoli
#100. Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today.
Andrew Sarris
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