“I enjoy playing the audience like a piano.”

One must never set up a murder. They must happen unexpectedly, as in life.

The picture’s over. Now I have to go and put it on film.

To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.

Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn’t have to cope with the actors and all the rest.

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don’t want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.

Claude Jade is a brave nice young lady. But I don’t give any guarantee what she will do on a taxi’s back seat.

I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks.

I’m full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm.

Mystery is an intellectual process. But suspense is essentially an emotional process.

When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, ‘It’s in the script.’ If he says, ‘But what’s my motivation?, ‘ I say, ‘Your salary.’

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you’re on.

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

To me Psycho was a big comedy. Had to be.

Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.

The American audience, having been exposed to a narrowing range of ideas over the decades, often assumes that what they see and hear in the major media is all there is.

The one thing about comedy, making it become a part of you, the audience loves it, because you become part of them.

Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.

I think test screening works at its best when the audience knows what it’s getting.

I always intended to be light and open. I misjudged the American audience.

I can’t imagine working without and audience.

When audiences come to see us authors lecture, it is largely in the hope that we’ll be funnier to look at than to read.

Westerns are very difficult to predict whether they’ll reach an audience or not.