“Film your murders like love scenes, and film your love scenes like murders.”

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

There is something more important than logic: imagination.

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

I like stories with lots of psychology.

A lot of movies are about life, mine are like a slice of cake.

Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.

Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

Never judge a country by its politicians.

I always take the audience into account.

You think she’s pretty, you ought to see my slingshot!

Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.

The Birds could be the most terrifying motion picture I have ever made.

There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.

This award is meaningful because it comes from my fellow dealers in celluloid.

One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes.

The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

I’m the only talk show host, I think, if there’s such a category in, what’s called, the book of records, to have a guest die while we were taping the show, yeah.

What will be the death of me are buillabaisses, food spiced with pimiento, shellfish, and a load of exquisite rubbish which I eat in disproportionate quantities.

If you believe Jesus ever had a good word for war or torture or tax cuts for the rich, or raping the earth, or refusing water to dying migrants, then you might as well believe bunnies lay painted eggs.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

Death is Peaceful, Life is Harder.

A living thing is distinguished from a dead thing by the multiplicity of the changes at any moment taking place in it.

He was giving up on keeping me alive, letting nature–or rather mob justice–take its course. When he returned, and I was dead, he wouldn’t hold anyone responsible. He would not mourn. All this I could hear in those three words.