Alfred Hitchcock

I like to play with the audience, to make them wonder what's going to happen next.

I'm a very visual person. I see things in pictures.

I don't think there's anything more terrifying than the unknown.

I like to tease the audience, to make them work for it.

I've never been very keen on women who hang their sex round their neck like baubles. I think it should be discovered. It's more interesting to discover the sex in a woman than it is to have it thrown at you, like a Marilyn Monroe or those types. To me they are rather vulgar and obvious.

Violence on the screen increases violence in people only if those people already have sick minds. I once read somewhere that a man admitted killing three women and he said he had killed the third woman after having seen Psycho. Well, I wanted to ask him what movie he had seen before he killed the second woman. And then we'd ban that movie, don't you see? And then if we found out that he'd had a glass of milk before he killed the first woman, why then we'd have to outlaw milk, too, wouldn't we?

I once made a movie, rather tongue-in-cheek, called Psycho. The content was, I felt, rather amusing and it was a big joke. I was horrified to find some people took it seriously. It was intended to make people scream and yell and so forth—but no more than screaming and yelling on a switchback railway (rollercoaster).

I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened; they revolt me. That round white thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there's that yellow thing, round, without any holes… Brrr! Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I've never tasted it.

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

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.

The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them.

Some of our most exquisite murders have been domestic, performed with tenderness in simple, homey places like the kitchen table.

My wife is an excellent cook, and I could die eating.

Puns are the highest form of literature.

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement.

I always believe in following the advice of the playwright [Victorien] Sardou. He said: 'Torture the women! ' … The trouble today is that we don't torture women enough.

It's just that the public doesn't care for films on politics.

I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I don't care about the subject matter; I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all of the technical ingredients that made the audience scream.