Top 165 Thriller Quotes

I’m still shooting on low budgets, though none of my movies has lost money, and I rarely get sent anything that stars a guy or is a thriller or is seriously dramatic. And I would love the opportunity to do those things.

For me a thriller is a very carefully structured story.

I think ‘The Searcher’ is a departure from my first because it’s less grounded in religion and is far more rooted in the mythic tradition: more of an existential thriller where the main character is actually the central mystery, and his journey is all about trying to figure himself out.

I really want to make a great record, like my ‘Rumours’ or ‘Thriller.’

With ‘The Xpose,’ the main challenge was to create timeless melodies. The thriller is set in the ’60s, and we didn’t want the songs to sound dated.

When the ‘Thriller’ album came up, we all knew that was going to be the cool record.

R.E.M.’s ‘Automatic for the People’ – that’s probably one of my favourite records – Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ – that’s some record – Crowded House’s ‘Together Alone’ – that’s brilliant, fantastic record.

‘Drohi’ is a thriller, quite action-oriented, at times, even violent, but blood will not be spilt at the drop of a hat.

I read nonfiction almost exclusively – both for research and also for pleasure. When I read fiction, it’s almost always in the thriller genre, and it needs to rivet me in the opening few chapters.

One of the things that I really admire about the Marvel motion pictures is that, in one year, ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ which was a taut political thriller, and ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ which was a cosmic comedy, came out, and they could not be more different, and yet they both felt very Marvel.

You don’t ever see a thriller with a spiritual backbone.

The very name of the thriller ’89’ suggests that there is suspense.

I find campfire stories and urban legends are kind of the bread and butter that inspires a lot of people who are making horror and thriller. There is a nugget of truth behind these sort of cautionary tales.

There have been things over the years that didn’t work. ‘Body Of Lies,’ directed by Ridley Scott, which I did with Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio, is a really tight action thriller, but when it opened in the U.S. it was number two to ‘Beverly Hills Chihuahua.’

‘A Just Defiance’ has been a huge success in South Africa. While reading at times like a well-written thriller, its significance is to reveal apartheid to have been far more brutal, ruthless, and self-serving even than we had suspected.

Thriller’ reshaped sound. It reshaped everything.

Hannibal Lecter stole Leatherface’s mask and ported the slasher conventions into the thriller for the early ’90s.

I thought I was going to make bigger films for mass audiences. And I wanted that. I actually had in mind a James-Bondian thriller.

Even with ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ I wanted to do a thriller. But I was still concentrating on the Faye Dunaway-Robert Redford relationship in that film.

People love a good thriller that makes them sit on their edge of their seats.

The secrets of small towns have fascinated writers and readers since the first psychological thriller was penned.

The industry is in an alarming condition. And we only have ourselves to blame. If one thriller runs, we all run to make thrillers. What about the dozen thrillers that flopped before that? More than the herd mentality it is the ostrich mentality.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn’t know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman’s ‘Marathon Man.’ That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

The thriller protagonist is really just us in extremis. He or she is this individual who is placed under enormous pressure, has huge moral dilemmas and decisions to make.

I’ve had a love affair with the desert ever since I can remember. No matter what I wrote – contemporary romance, spy thriller, high fantasy – it was going to have a desert in it.

I have lots of records, quite a collection, actually, that I stole from my mom. I have the original ‘Thriller’ album and I have a really great ‘Elton John’s Greatest Hits,’ and I also have a N.E.R.D. album. Records sound more original. They have more edge.

Sheesha’ is a thriller. It was exciting to play my first double role in the film.

For people that don’t know and haven’t seen a Bollywood film, you need to go and see one. They give you everything in one. They give you your comedy, your fear, your horror, your thriller, your rom-com. It’s everything in one.

I love Britain. I’d like to work there. Maybe a BBC crime show; I love those. A thriller would be something different.

If you want to laugh, see a comedy. If you want to cry, see a drama, and if you want suspense, see a thriller.

Anybody who sits down to write, and they think ‘thriller,’ maybe shouldn’t be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking ‘novel,’ maybe ‘thriller’ way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story.

I don’t find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it’s a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.

What I would like to do is a thriller. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time, but one that was not at all dependent on special effects. Just purely psychological, but will scare the hell out of you. That’s what I would like to do. I have not found it yet.

When I wrote my eighth thriller, ‘Inside Out,’ in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.

The song that’s affected me the most profoundly is probably Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ or, more specifically, the couple seconds of instrumental break before Vincent Price starts ‘rapping.’

If you’re unwell you can simply cuddle up in bed and tune into a thriller. It’s the best remedy.

I’ve been thinking of doing a sci-fi thriller or a sci-fi noir, if that’s possible.

In every thriller written about Washington, particularly after 9/11, there are good guys and there are bad guys, and there’s no gray area at all.

That’s what everyone said attracted them to Lantana – I call it an adult mystery, because it’s not a thriller in the sense of that other way, but it is a mystery.

I like thrillers. That’s a genre that I’m really taken with. I love Hitchcock, that thriller style. I’m a student of it.

I did turn down ‘The Virgin Suicides.’ I talked to the producers about it, and I just honestly told them that I didn’t get it. Is it supposed to be funny, is it a thriller, what is it?

Sound design is always critical, especially when you’re doing a thriller with a lot of suspense and tension.

My number one goal as a thriller writer is to entertain you. But I’ve got a chance to not only entertain people, but have them close my book and be smarter having read it.

With the police thriller genre, people come to it with an expectation. It allows you to get away with a bit of violence, edginess, darkness.

On a serious note, I just enjoy exploring the unconventional. I like Alfred Hitchcock; I actually grew up watching his films. A thriller gives you much more scope of exhibiting creativity in terms of playing with the camera and sound, as against a typical love story.

I do like crime thriller stories. That’s because these stories have a lot of layers. There are always three sides to such stories… there is a truth, there is a lie and then there is the ultimate truth. Different human emotions and intense interpersonal relationships form the core of stories in this genre.

I love a psychological thriller, particularly ones that are written by women. I’ve just finished ‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn, which was so creepy and never failed to surprise me, particularly the end.

It will be a killer, and a chiller, and a thriller, when I get the gorilla in Manila.

Thomas Pynchon surely inaugurated or crystallized a new genre in 1963 when he published ‘V.’ The seriocomic mystery or thriller with one foot set in the present and one in various historical eras received its postmodern baptism from Pynchon.

In a thriller, the camera’s an active narrator, or can be.

The things I discovered when writing ‘Line of Duty’ were the tools you have available to write a thriller.

A western audience might not appreciate ‘Chanakya’s Chant’ because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.

I think ‘North by Northwest’ and ‘Rope’ and Rear Window’ and ‘Psycho’ are on my list of favorite all time movies. I just think his kind of command as a director was almost unparalleled, and I feel like in certain ways the sort of character-based thriller owes more to Hitchcock than anyone.