A selection of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable and witty quotes.
Alfred Hitchcock was a British-born filmmaker, producer, and screenwriter, famous for being the driving force behind the suspense and psychological thriller genres in Hollywood films.
After passing from silent cinema in England, Hitchcock developed in the American seventh art, using anxiety and fear as his personal stamp to create interesting and cult films. If you are interested in learning more about the mind behind all this creativity, you will like this selection of the best Alfred Hitchcock quotes .
Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable phrases
To learn more about the dark work and his private life, we bring a compilation with the quotes and reflections of Alfred Hitchcock.
- Give them pleasure. The same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
Horror movies awaken our adrenaline.
- Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
His greatest strength was creating a very tense environment in his films.
- In feature films the director is God. In documentaries, God is the director.
On the importance of directing in cinema.
- Maybe you’re interested: “91 creative phrases to let the imagination fly”
- There is something more important than logic: it is imagination.
The imagination is what awakens the emotions.
- A movie is good, when the price of dinner, the ticket to the cinema and the garage were worth it.
When it becomes quite an experience.
- There is more emotion, realism, intrigue, violence, and interest in a romance novel than in most thrillers.
The drama occurs in any event of everyday life.
- Puns are the highest form of literature.
Leave a clear message indirectly.
- This fear complex is ingrained in every individual.
We are all afraid of something.
- There is no terror in the explosion, only in the anticipation of it.
It is not the action, but what directs us to it.
- Whenever possible, the public should be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the climax of the story.
About what there is and what should not be revealed to the public.
- The duration of a film must be directly related to the resistance of the human bladder.
Reflecting on how long a good movie should last.
- Luck is everything… My good luck in life was being a really scary person.
An example of how we can use our fears as a strength.
- The ideal husband understands every word his wife doesn’t say.
Non-verbal communication says more than our words.
- Never judge a country by its politicians.
Countries are more than their rulers. It is its people and its culture.
- Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more excitement.
What attracted him most about suspense is that he can use all his imagination.
- Many movies are about life, mine are like a piece of cake.
Little but very pleasant and tempting.
- In a good marriage each is the other’s better half.
In any relationship, the goal should be to improve individually and as a team.
- I am full of fears and I do everything possible to avoid difficulties and any kind of complication.
Therefore, he preferred a quiet and calm life.
- I always try to tell a story in a cinematic way, through a succession of shots and film fragments in between.
Using the techniques of cinema to tell their stories.
- A child’s best friend is his mother.
A child’s relationship with his mother is fundamental.
- Silent movies were the purest form of cinema.
Flattering the guy at the movie theater he started with.
- When we think that someone has hurt us in the past, we create defenses to protect ourselves from being hurt in the future. So the scary past causes a scary future and the past and the future become one.
The best thing in the face of wounds is to seek to heal them, to avoid closing ourselves off from new experiences.
- People don’t always express their inner thoughts to each other.
Many people hide a whole world in their minds.
- I always try to see things as if I remembered them three years later.
Hitchcock thought of the future.
- Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement, and the occasional good meal.
That is why the villains must also be given a daily life.
- Related article: “60 movie phrases that marked the history of cinema”
- To make a great movie you need three things: the script, the script and the script.
The script is everything for a good plot.
- Until the husband absolutely understands every word his wife has said, he is not really married.
An interesting reflection on interaction within marriage.
- For me, the cinema is four hundred seats to fill.
It’s entertaining every person in the audience.
- Unfortunately the sound created by man has never obtained the purity of the sound obtained by the animal.
Talking about the history of the origin of bagpipes.
- It is very likely that it was because of the impression that Poe’s stories made on me that I dedicated myself to shooting suspense films.
Talking about one of his inspirations.
- Seeing a murder on television can help us discharge our own feelings of hate. If they don’t have feelings of hate, they can be obtained in the advertising interval.
One of the events that make our emotions explode.
- Never turn your back on a friend.
The worst betrayal is the one that comes from someone you consider a great friend.
- All the love scenes that started on set continue in the dressing room.
Many actors take their passions from the screen into their private lives.
- A look at the world proves that horror is nothing but reality.
As the saying goes, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’.
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- I am a typed director.
The way he perceived his artistic direction.
- In many of the films that are being made now, there is very little cinema. They are mostly what I call ‘photographs of people talking’.
A critique of the way other directors made movies.
- There is a clear difference between “suspense” and “surprise” and yet many images continually confuse them.
An expected mix-up in his jobs, since he knew how to mix them up.
- In the movies the murders are always very clean. I show how difficult it is and how complicated it is to kill a man.
It is a process that seeks to stick to reality.
- Mystery is an intellectual process… But suspense is essentially an emotional process.
That is why Hitchcock fuses both.
- Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed tenderly in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.
Maybe those are the perfect crimes?
- Actually, winning has nothing. That is if you’re lucky enough to have a sharp eye, a quick mind, and no qualms.
There are victories that need to be won with a dark heart.
- Our main function is to create an emotion and our secondary function is to maintain those emotions.
Perpetuate the emotions throughout the film.
- I’ve never really liked women who hang their sex around their necks like baubles. I think it should be discovered.
Bringing her love of mystery to all her tastes.
- There is nothing better than a burial at sea, it is simple, orderly and not very incriminating.
An interesting way to be in eternal rest.
- I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is that it becomes a series of images rather than a book.
A very visual person.
- My love for cinema is greater than my morals.
What are you willing to do to achieve perfection?
- I am not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.
One of the things he preferred to avoid, an encounter with the police.
- I don’t want to sound immodest, but I can’t help but compare what I’ve tried to put into my films with what Poe put into his narratives.
Finding a similarity between both.
- Self-plagiarism is style.
Can we plagiarize something that is ours?
- When an actor tells me that he wants to discuss his character, I tell him: It’s in the script. If he tells me: But, what is my motivation? I tell him: Your salary.
A sample of how I dealt with the actors.
- If I had made Cinderella people would have looked for a corpse in the horse carriage.
Without a doubt, an interesting plot to watch.
- I apologize for the blood displayed on today’s show. Next time we will try to do better.
An ironic comment on criticism of his way of making movies.
- Related article: “100 funny phrases that express a sense of humor”
- I don’t understand why we have to experiment with cinema. I think everything should be done on paper.
For Hitchcock, no movie could be made without having the whole story on paper.
- Happiness is a small house, with a large kitchen.
A home spirit.
- I enjoy playing to the public like a piano.
Leaving emotions on the surface.
- A conversation can be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person is really thinking or feeling.
Listen not only to the words they say to you, pay attention to their gestures.
- Making a film means, above all, telling a story. That story may be improbable, but it should never be trivial. It must be dramatic and human.
It must be an expression of people’s lives.
- We all go a little crazy sometimes.
We all have the ability to go crazy.
- Reality is something that none of us can bear, at any time.
That’s why we look for things that take us away from it for a while.
- I know what it’s like to feel alone and helpless and have the whole world against me.
Hitchcock was never immune to feeling rejected and isolated.
- I like everything around me to be crystal clear and completely calm.
Having a calm life is the best thing to enjoy it.
- The only way to get rid of my fears is to make movies about them.
A sample that art can be a catharsis.
- One should never prepare a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.
Hitchcock was carried away by spontaneity.
- I believe in putting the horror in the mind of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen.
He worked to offer the audience an experience, not the plot.
- If I’m not going to be myself, who will?
A beautiful reflection on being ourselves.
- I have the feeling that somewhere inside you there is someone that no one knows.
We all have a hidden character that few know.
- I am lucky to be a coward, to have a low fear threshold, because a hero could not make a good suspense movie.
Using his weakness as his greatest source of inspiration.
- If it’s a good movie, the sound could play and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.
It is the image that attracts us.
- The more successful the villain, the more successful the image.
The success of a villain is what we come to feel as viewers.
- I am sure that everyone likes a good crime, as long as they are not the victim.
Nobody wants to suffer a crime.
- Ideas come from everything.
A good idea can come from anywhere that surrounds us.
- Fear is not so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all scared as kids?
It is a natural response.
- Revenge is sweet and does not make you fat.
The best dessert.
- I don’t want to seem disloyal to television, but I think reading will do you good.
Television entertains, but books give us knowledge.
- Imagine a man sitting on the favorite sofa in his house. Below is a bomb ready to explode. He ignores it, but the public knows it. This is suspense.
What makes us hook to a plot.
- Film your murders as love scenes and film your love scenes as murders.
Love and suspense as one.
- I am a writer and therefore automatically a suspicious character.
On the excessive imagination of writers.
- What is drama but life with the boring parts cut out?
It is what leads us to seek more.
- Television has done a lot for psychiatry: it has not only publicized its existence, but has also contributed to making it necessary.
Television can have a negative effect on people’s development.
- Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What scares us today is exactly the same kind of thing that scared us yesterday.
The fear is the same, only with a different face.
