Top 80 Hitchcock Quotes

I still don’t feel I know Hitchcock at all. I find that the more one looks, the more elusive he becomes. But my admiration for Hitchcock the filmmaker remains undiminished. He is a giant of the cinema and the darkness in him informs his cinematic language. You can’t separate one from the other.

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be – although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

When you watch a Hitchcock movie, you feel like learning back because there’s a master in control.

When I started watching movies, I saw a lot of Hitchcock films. When I was 10, I saw ‘North by Northwest’ and movies like that.

I like films that just put you in someone’s world. It can be very subversive. Hitchcock would put you in the mind of a psychopath, and you’d care about them.

The rules of suspense are that you do know, and you just don’t know when. In the Hitchcock rules of suspense, you are supposed to know that there is a bomb on the bus that might blow up, and then it becomes very tense – but if you don’t know that there’s a bomb and it just blows up, then it’s just a surprise.

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.

I don’t think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

Four hours of prosthetics every morning, the jowls and the nose, and it was very hot so they’re having to attend to it all day, and you’re still petrified of so many things, such as, can I speak properly? Hitchcock never quite lost those East End vowels, even though he had the softened California consonants.

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.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

When television began, it modeled itself after radio. Many early television programs were radio programs first. ‘My Favorite Wife,’ ‘The Jack Benny Show,’ ‘Burns and Allen,’ ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’

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.

That is – the use of the subjective camera is an idea that’s been around in movies for a long, long time. And it’s an idea that was seized on very notably by Sam Fuller and by Alfred Hitchcock in two different very kind of – otherwise very different styles of filmmaking.

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 liked that sort of thing, those one-off stories like ‘Tales of the Unexpected,’ ‘Hammer House of Horror,’ ‘The Twilight Zone’ and ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’

I wanted to be Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and Hitchcock. I’d wanted to be a director since 13, and horror and the suspense thriller were the most powerful genres to me.

Truffaut loved Hitchcock.

Well, for someone who looks like me you wonder where Alfred Hitchcock is.

I grew up on Edgar Allen Poe, and I loved Alfred Hitchcock’s movies.

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.

Mr. Hitchcock knew what he was doing.

Saturday mornings, or at night when I’m trying to go to bed, I’ll watch Hitchcock mysteries and stuff. I know that’s pretty boring, but it feels comfortable. It’s called ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents.’

I would have loved to have been in a Hitchcock movie.

I really love Hitchcock; I think he was a complete genius, to me one of the best directors. Such a sense of how to put things together.

‘North by Northwest’ took two and a half to three months to film. When I look back, I realise I wasn’t intimidated by Hitchcock and Cary Grant. They were so accepting of me.

I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, ‘Dial M for Murder,’ and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective.

Akira Kurosawa, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock were the main inspirations for ‘Samurai Jack,’ along with a lot of ’70s cinema.

With Hitchcock, you work with a script, and you stick to it.

I met with Hitchcock when I was a very, very young actress just starting out and he was making ‘Frenzy’ in London and I was sent along to meet with him. He was very, very unimpressed with me and I have to say, I was rather unimpressed with him – but only because I was an arrogant, ignorant young actress.

Some of my favorite scores include Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores.

I worked with the best directors – Martin Scorsese, John Huston, David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock was great.

My knowledge of trains – and love before first sight, love at negative-one sight – comes from Alfred Hitchcock.

I suppose I was interested in creating a vision; in the same way, I was very drawn to tension within cinema. Hitchcock was my other early obsession – ‘Psycho’ and its score. So there was the sense of trying to create an atmosphere: how a sound resonates and makes an effect.

I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I’m having trouble. I’ve just sacked my second screenwriter.

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.

To me, still my favorite 3D film is ‘Dial M for Murder.’ I thought that was great. Hitchcock used it, could put you in the room, which I thought was fantastic, but I’m still not a devotee of 3D.

I knew I wanted to become an actor when I was 7 years old. My dad was working with Alfred Hitchcock, my mom was working with Martin Scorsese – and it was the great summer of my childhood.

I’m a huge fan of Akira Kurosawa, a big Hitchcock fan.

Hitchcock was one of the few people in Hollywood who had a brand. Every movie he made was an Alfred Hitchcock movie, couldn’t have been anyone else.

Hitchcock had a charm about him. He was very funny at times. He was incredibly brilliant in his field of suspense.

Hitchcock had to fight to the death to make his movies.

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.

No matter how many books I’ve sold, nothing can correct the fact I look like Alfred Hitchcock from the side.

Alfred Hitchcock was right when he said that actors are basically like cattle. Directors just look at us and yell ‘Move!’

Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films.

Being the object of Alfred Hitchcock’s obsession was horrific, but while he ruined my career, he could never ruin my life.

Every different director has another language – for instance, Hitchcock does not like any bright color ever, unless the story says ‘there goes the girl in a red dress.’

I had to be extremely strong to fight off Mr Hitchcock. He was so insistent and obsessive, but I was an extremely strong young woman, and there was no way he was going to get the better of me.

So I think it is common knowledge that Hitchcock had fantasies or whatever you want to call them about his leading ladies.

Who was the real Hitchcock? I interviewed him once and haven’t a clue.

I don’t steal stories. If I’m a plagiarist, so is Hitchcock. And Tolkien. And Shakespeare.

The great thing for me is how Hitchcock uses guilt so well. He implicates the spectator in the character’s field, and you really feel it, and there’s incredible relief when it comes out right – if it does come out right.

I read mysteries like Nancy Drew and Alfred Hitchcock, and I swim and I ride my motorbike.

When people think of a Hitchcock movie, it isn’t just the visual, it’s the sound.

I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies… Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows.

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.

B.I.G. was like the Alfred Hitchcock of rap. Like, this dude’s story form was so nuts.