Quotes & Sayings About Hitchcock

Guys like Spielberg and Zemeckis and really anybody who is a storyteller-filmmaker today has studied Hitchcock and the way he visually tells a story. He was the master of suspense, certainly, but visually you would get a lot of information from what he would do with the camera and what he would allow you to see as the story was unfolding. — Ralph Macchio

Every time you look at a house in Los Angeles, the real-estate agent will tell you that someone famous once lived there. It always seemed irrelevant to me: Does a property gain value just because Alfred Hitchcock used to eat breakfast there? — Claire Scovell LaZebnik

One's only real regret in life is the failure to act. — Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Libraries are like houses of worship: Whether or not you use them yourself, it's important to know that they are there. In many ways they define a society and the values of that society. Librarians to me are the keepers of the flame of knowledge. When I was growing up, the librarian in my local library looked like a meek little old lady, but after you spent some time with her, you realized she was Athena with a sword, a wise and wonderful repository of wisdom. — Jane Stanton Hitchcock

Medicine and society have entered into a folie a deaux regarding medicine's importance in gigantic population ills. We believe that genetics and pills and enzymes bring us health. We wait for the dementia cure (the obesity cure, the diabetes cure) rather than changing our society to decrease incidence and severity. We slash social welfare programs and access to GPs and ignore the downstream effect this will have on future generations.
To reduce non-communicable disease, the actions we need to take are societal: make it easier for people to move and eat well, strengthen education, promote community participation and meaningful work. Our collective delusion is that we can have all the benefits such a society would bring without the structural supports necessary to bring it into being, that we can attain health by inventing and buying drugs.
It is hard to know which is the more utopian vision: magic pills or a society serious about prevention. — Karen Hitchcock

Hitchcock's got a very interesting voice; it's a very controlled, measured rhythm that's quite slow and, in that sense, also felt quite controlling in its pace. He retained something from his childhood, that London sound, as well as adopting some of the L.A. sounds ... All of this helps you create the character. — Toby Jones

At a banquet given in his honour Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock once modestly attributed his success in life to the habit of "getting up earlier than the other fellow." But this was partly metaphorical, partly false and in case wholly relative for journalists are as a rule late risers. — Evelyn Waugh

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. — David Cronenberg

Truffaut loved Hitchcock. — Noah Baumbach

I read mysteries like Nancy Drew and Alfred Hitchcock, and I swim and I ride my motorbike. — Heather O'Rourke

When accepting the American Film Institute Life Achievement award: I beg permission to mention by name only four people who have given me the most affection, appreciation, and encouragement, and constant collaboration. The first of the four is a film editor, the second is a scriptwriter, the third is the mother of my daughter Pat (Patricia Hitchcock), and the fourth is as fine a cook as ever performed miracles in a domestic kitchen. And their names are Alma Reville. — Alfred Hitchcock

I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks. — Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock said he viewed actors as cattle.. but some were free range. — Catherine Crier

I've been able to make a good living as a musician, but now it's time to do all the other stuff. — Robyn Hitchcock

Atheistic morality is not impossible, but it will never answer our purpose. — Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

Hitchcock loves to be misunderstood, because he has based his whole life around misunderstandings. — Francois Truffaut

That's a little homage in a way to that and also to create that sort of creepy atmosphere that Hitchcock did. Vertigo was one of his great movies that was shot right here in The City and it's about a woman and the psychological twists and so forth. — Philip Kaufman

Virtue, for us, is obedience to God in Christ. — Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception. — Robyn Hitchcock

You realize that the first Bryan Ferry album was pretty good although at the time it seemed a bit cheesy. — Robyn Hitchcock

The Los Angeles Citizen-News (5/29/58) concurred, but felt the picture had more serious problems in the story department: Unfortunately, the story, as adapted for the screen comes off less praiseworthy, for most of the time the picture is not a little confusing. The story line is not easy to follow. ... Vertigo is technically a topnotch film. Storywise, little can be said. Hitchcock does as well as he can, considering the script, in a directorial capacity. Vertigo is not his best picture. — Dan Auiler

Every 20 minutes you've got to have a bump, you've got to have a change in course, you've got to unsettle the audience. It can't be too predictable so something has to happen. I think that was something that Hitchcock did very well too. You couldn't let an audience feel too settled in. — Barbara Broccoli

With horror stories in general, I try and take Truffaut and Alfred Hitchcock's advice and convey to the audience: Everyone has something to feel guilty about. — Chris Mentillo

One of the ideas behind doing this acoustic record is that I didn't want to have to produce it by committee. — Robyn Hitchcock

As a kid, I was a Hitchcock lover; I cared about the dark side of things. — Teller

Religion is not a dogma, nor an emotion, but a service. — Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

Our primary function is to create an emotion and our secondary function is to sustain that emotions. — Alfred Hitchcock

Of course, when you're doing something that's unexpected, people are going to have a very specific point of view about it, but I think it's all good to have a healthy debate about who Hitchcock was and what that means to people. He means a lot of different things to a lot of different people because the films are so great. If the movies were not great, no one would be bothering to show any interest. — Sacha Gervasi

My anxious gaze swept the theater.
"Don't worry. I told them it was Sunday," Ayden said as we sat down.
"And they believed you?"
"Of course." He passed me the popcorn and took off his jacket. "I'm the master of deception."
"Uh-huh. So, when did you become a Hitchcock fan?"
"After I saw Psycho," answered a voice clearly not Ayden's.
We turned to stare at Blake.
And Jayden.
And Tristan.
And Logan.
All sitting behind us.
I smirked at a sheepish Ayden. "Oh yeah, master of deception. — A&E Kirk

Let there be more darkness — Robyn Hitchcock

It's one of those jobs where you go, 'Oh no, I've got to play Alfred Hitchcock. I have to play him even though I know what this is going to involve.' — Toby Jones

Catholics are pretty good at keeping Jesus nailed to that cross, rather than focusing more on that happy bit where he rose from the dead and freed us from sin and evil. — Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

Hitchcock is a big ask. I am playing someone significantly older than me and someone significantly bigger than me. The stuff I find very interesting is why certain physical things have come about. How can he be light on his feet when he is so big? How can his weight vary so much? Where does this rather beautiful voice come from? — Toby Jones

Luck is everything ... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film. — Alfred Hitchcock

Production is something I've never come to terms with. — Robyn Hitchcock

The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea. — Jean-Luc Godard

I use every single thing that Alfred Hitchcock taught me in my acting career ... I am very grateful for the education he gave me in making motion pictures. — Tippi Hedren

One of my few childhood memories is as an eight-year-old, refused permission to watch the Hitchcock season on Irish television, sneakily viewing 'The Birds' though a crack in the living-room door. It transformed my hitherto perfectly enjoyable half-mile walk to school, down a country lane patrolled by watchful birds, into a terrifying ordeal. — Mariella Frostrup

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. — David Chase

You're young forever when you write. Alfred Hitchcock directed until the day he died. As long as you don't have any dementia or Alzheimer's, if you have your All-Bran every day and clear yourself out, I think your brains are gonna be all right. — Mel Brooks

Caesar was Rome's escape from communism. I expect no Caesar; I find on our map no Rubicon. But then I expect to see communistic madness rebuked and ended. — Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films. — Jonathan Demme

That is the most frightening sight I have ever seen. — Alfred Hitchcock

I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theater - and it has to be filled. — Alfred Hitchcock

After Nashville sushi and a long debate on Bob Dylan, we went into Woodland Studios at 10 pm that night for a look around, and jammed for 5 hours solid. — Robyn Hitchcock

He only is great at heart who floods the world with a great affection. He only is great of mind who stirs the world with great thoughts. He only is great of will who does something to shape the world to a great career. And he is greatest who does the most of all these things and does them best. — Roswell Dwight Hitchcock

I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful. — Paul Haggis

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. — Atom Egoyan

American Morons is the work of an original. Like Hitchcock or Ramsey Campbell, the style is precise, alert, and well-mannered, inviting us to enter Hirshberg's private world so that he may lock the door behind us. If there is anyone in contemporary fiction worth watching, it is Glen Hirshberg. — Dennis Etchison

Compassion is the most necessary ingredient in all relationships. Everything depends on it. — Jane Stanton Hitchcock

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

With the poetry of plain speaking, Shannon Hitchcock recreates the daily drama of a vanished world. — Richard Peck

Satan and that man is still man even after 1000 years of the righteous, benevolent rule of Christ on earth. Even under the most ideal circumstances imaginable, man is still totally depraved and in desperate need of a new heart by the regeneration of the Spirit of God. — Mark Hitchcock

Vertigo is probably my favourite Hitchcock film and probably one of my favourite films of all time. It's a film that I'm obsessed with. I saw it on its first release in vista vision, projected in vista-vision, at the Capitol Theatre in New York. That moment when the nun comes up in the end ... it's just an extraordinary shot. — Martin Scorsese

Hitchcock's murder set-pieces are so potent, they can galvanize (and frighten) even a viewer who's seen them before! — Leonard Maltin

In this world of doubt, one thing is certain for me; that I will go on writing songs up to and - I hope, through heavenly means or diabolical - beyond the day I die. — Robyn Hitchcock

For every answer, I like to bring up a question. Maybe I'm related to Alfred Hitchcock or maybe I got to know him too well, but I think life should be that way. — Kim Novak

We have a need to be religious, we need to worship, we need to build totems and shrines and icons, but nobody's sure in honor of what. — Robyn Hitchcock

For me, suspense doesn't have any value if it's not balanced by humor. — Alfred Hitchcock

People described me then as a "socialite," a label I loathe. It cast me in a lurid and ridiculous light, implying a life of privileged frivolity where everyone fits around from one party to the next wearing calculated clothes and expensive smiles — Jane Stanton Hitchcock

I became a musician because that's really what I wanted to do when I was fifteen, but I had other abilities. — Robyn Hitchcock

I can tell how I'm doing, and I can tell if the crowd is particularly dead. — Robyn Hitchcock

I always take the audience into account. — Alfred Hitchcock

I think Hitchcock had a thing about hills: think of the house on the hill in 'Psycho.' Then, in 'Vertigo,' Scottie is forever traversing the city, going downhill all the time as he goes deeper and deeper into himself. It's as if Hitchcock is using San Francisco as a psychological map. — Allen Coulter

A glimpse into the world proves that horror is nothing other than reality. — Alfred Hitchcock

I enjoy playing the audience like a piano. — Alfred Hitchcock

I think it will be, as always, interesting to compare different portrayals of Hitchcock. I'm very honored that I'm playing the same part as Anthony Hopkins. — Toby Jones

Hitchcock's debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family's North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock's story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant.
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY — Publishers Weekly

I make cameos in all my movies for no particular reason other than a joke. It's just a Hitchcock thing. — Peter Jackson

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. — Kate Bush

Early on, my abandoning father had set the pattern of my love life on the loom of my subconscious. — Jane Stanton Hitchcock

CHAT ROOM G. S. Hitchcock — G.S. Hitchcock

The key to life is imagination. If you don't have that, no mater what you have, it's meaningless. If you do have imagination ... you can make feast of straw. — Jane Stanton Hitchcock

The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. — Alfred Hitchcock

A few years ago, there were requests to me, Can we make this? I said that I have no rights. Contact the Hitchcock estate, which won't release it for a remake. — Patricia Highsmith

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect 'woman of mystery' is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find. — Alfred Hitchcock

All babies look like Alfred Hitchcock. Or Winston Churchill. — Suzanne Brockmann

He wasn't directing it, of course, so I didn't work with Hitchcock. — Sally Kellerman

I'm good at line-drawing, and some of my color stuff is okay. So I just do it for record covers. — Robyn Hitchcock

I like stories with lots of psychology. — Alfred Hitchcock

When I spoke to a colleague about Joe's report, her face registered surprise. She said, "Is it possible for a death in a nursing home to be premature?"
Joe told me, "If it were happening in any other kind of institution, to any other part of the population - workers, say, or children - there'd be an outcry, media, inquiries, swift intervention. The truth is we do not value the last months or years of a person's life. The remaining life of someone old. Particularly if they are in residential care."
If we are all just economic units who lift or lean, then very little is "lost" when a nursing home resident or anyone getting on in their years dies prematurely. In fact money might be saved - one less nursing-home bed to fund, and the kids can finally get their hands on the house. — Karen Hitchcock

The fact that you couldn't see Alfred Hitchcock's first film The Mountain Eagle, or that you couldn't see so many of F.W. Murnau's masterpieces, or that you couldn't see so many of Oscar Micheaux's really intriguing race melodramas, made with fierce independent spirit against all odds in '20s and '30s America. That stuff haunted me. They really did bring to life a sense of 20th Century history: cultural history, pop history, gender politics and race politics, socio economic history, all that stuff. It was bracing and instructive. — Guy Maddin

Some trials look as much like the trial of an ordinary criminal case as a Hitchcock film looks like a home movie. — Stephen Gillers

There is something more important than logic: imagination — Alfred Hitchcock

She wondered what he really saw when he looked at her. God, she hoped she didn't look like his mother or anything. That would be veering into a Hitchcock shower scene that she really didn't want to be the star of. — Jane Cousins

You have to come from somewhere, but you don't have to go back there anymore. — Robyn Hitchcock

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them. — Maurice Jarre

There are two kinds of filmmaking: Hitchcock's (the film is complete in the director's mind) and Coppola's (which thrives on process). For Hitchcock, any variation from the complete internal idea is seen as a defect. The perfection already exists. Coppola's approach is to harvest the random elements that the process throws up, things that were not in his mind when he began. — Walter Murch

I studied Hitchcock a little bit at University and knew the famous story about the Birds - that he'd tortured Tippi for a day using real birds. I had no idea that it was a five-day onslaught and that it was the tip of an iceberg that carried on through to another film. — Toby Jones

Because isn't that how forever happens- instantly? — Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture. — Alfred Hitchcock

I suddenly realized how much I loved her when we attended Alfred Hitchcock's 75th birthday party last August. There was something magical about that night, and it made me see how much she really meant to me. — Rod Taylor

Actually, I have no regard for money. Aside from its purchasing power, it's completely useless as far as I'm concerned. — Alfred Hitchcock

A violent act pierces the atmosphere, leaving a hole through which the cold, damp draft of its memory blows forever. — Jane Stanton Hitchcock

I could never be like Hitchcock and do only one kind of movie. Anything that's good is worthwhile. — Robert Zemeckis

Hitchcock is the most-daring avant-garde film-maker in America today. — Andrew Sarris

You think she's pretty, you ought to see my slingshot! — Alfred Hitchcock

Film works when a director and a star have a connection. You know, when there's something telekinetic between them, there's a partnership, it's like alter egos. It's like James Stewart and Alfred Hitchcock, or Fellini and Mastroianni. I'm not comparing, I'm just saying, if you can come into a relationship where the director and star have such a bond, it's so much easier to make a movie. — Nicolas Winding Refn

I've become a body of films, not a man, I am all those films. — Alfred Hitchcock

There is nothing so good as a burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating. — Alfred Hitchcock