Alfred Hitchcock Quotes (1899-1980)

“One of television’s great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs.”

“I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.”

“One of television's great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs.”

“Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.”

“Grace Kelly's apparent frigidity was like a mountain covered with snow, but that mountain was a volcano.”

“The whole point about Tallulah was that she had no inhibitions. Now some people can take this, others can't.”

“Marlene Dietrich is a professional – a professional actress, a professional dress designer, a professional cameraman.”

“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.”

“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.”

“[Hitchcock, on the set of Marnie] I've never gone into detail about this, and I never will. I'll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual, it was perverse. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became.”

“[Explaining her initial silence on his behaviour] sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn't exist [at the time].”

“[Hitchcock quoted] "I'm on a diet. And I don't do crazy tricks in my pictures any more. You know what a good time I used to have in the old days, with violent cuts and dissolves and wipes, everything in the room spinning round, standing on its head, all that sort of thing. But I've stopped all that. I haven't time to waste any more on technical tricks. I like my screen well filled, every corner used, but I've no fancy theories I want the cutting and continuity to be as inconspicuous as possible. All I'm concerned with is to get the characters developed and the story clearly told, without wasting any footage. I've turned technical ascetic, kid, without either fun or luxuries."”

“I suppose what surprised me most about Hitchcock was how little he directed us. I had done a number of films for Carol Reed and he seemed quite meticulous in contrast. Hitchcock, however, didn't seem to direct us at all. He was a dozing, nodding Buddha with an enigmatic smile on his face.”

“When you think of the visual style, when you think of the visual language of a film there tends to be a natural separation of the visual style and the narrative elements, but with the great, whether it is Stanley Kubrick, Terrence Malick or Hitchcock what you're seeing is inseparable, a vital relationship between the images and the story he's telling.”

“Hitchcock finds women captivating but dangerous. She allures by nature but she is chief artificer in civilisation, a magic fabricator of persona whose very smile is an arc of deception.”

“In another Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent, one of the most exciting and melodramatic sequences ever made, the airplane crash in mid-ocean is accomplished with a minimum of reference, in the speed and economy of image that is to be found in concentrated poems.”