Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was a British film director and producer, closely associated with the suspense thriller genre. He is a well-known man and an award-winning director. He directed and produced two of the 100 Greatest American Movies, Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), two psychological thrillers.

Sourced

• The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made.
  • Movie trailer for the 1960s film The Birds

• Never turn your back on a friend.
  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents

• I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.
  • Newsweek (11 June 1956)

• Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
  • Alfred Hitchcock Presents. 1960

• 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.
  • News summaries (31 December 1963)

• Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.
  • NY Journal-American (25 August 1965)

• One of television’s great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs.
  • National Observer (15 August 1966)

• 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.
  • National Observer (15 August 1966)

• 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.
  • As quoted in Hitchcock (1967) by Francois Truffaut

• Give them pleasure — the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
  • on audiences, Asbury Park NJ Press, 13 Aug. 1974

• Self-plagiarism is style.
  • defending repetition of his filming techniques, London Observer, 8 Aug. 1976

• Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.
  • CBS TV, 20 Feb. 1977

• [This award is] meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid.
  • on receiving American Film Institute’s 1979 Lifetime Achievement Award, recalled on his death, 29 Apr. 1980

• I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.
  • New Society, London, 10 May, 1984

• In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is the god; he must create life.
  • François Truffaut with the collaboration of Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock, rev. ed., cop. 1984, p. 102

Quotes about Hitchcock

• Hitch is a gentleman farmer who raises goose flesh. ~ Ingrid Bergman

• The man with the navy-blue voice. ~ Barbara Harris (London Observer 6 Aug 76)

• Like Freud, Hitchcock diagnosed the discontents that chafe and rankle beneath the decorum of civilization. Like Picasso or Dali, he registered the phenomenological threat of an abruptly modernised world. — Peter Conrad

• Here is someone, who has an enormous, inordinate, neurotic fear of disorder. And that's from which he makes his art. He always has his people in a moment of disorder. They think they're in control, they think they have power, they think they have order, and then he just slips the rug out from under them to see what they're going to do. — Drew Casper

• I'd like to know more about his relationships with women. No, on second thought, I wouldn't. — Ingrid Bergman