“Man does not live by murder alone. He needs affection, approval, encouragement and, occasionally, a hearty meal.”

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

Puns are the highest form of literature.

For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.

I was an uncommonly unattractive young man.

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

Kicking is very important in football. In fact, some of the more enthusiastic players even kick the ball, occasionally.

I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me.

Even my failures make money and become classics a year after I make them.

Self-plagiarism is style.

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

I always try to look at things as though I were remembering them three years later.

A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.

All love scenes started on the set are continued in the dressing room.

Conversation is the enemy of good wine and food.

When you can look forward, and the road is clear ahead, and now you are going to create something – that’s as happy as I’d want to be.

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

SPIRITUAL EXERCISES whereby to conquer oneself, and order one’s life, without being influenced in one’s decision by any inordinate affection.

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.

The Sun, the hearth of affection and life, pours burning love on the delighted earth.

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

Love, that is all I asked, a little love, daily, twice daily, fifty years of twice daily love like a Paris horse-butcher’s regular, what normal woman wants affection?

We shall reach our goal, when we have the power to laugh as we destroy, as we smash, whatever was sacred to us as tradition, as education, and as human affection.

He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetness of spirit did not exist.