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

Happiness is a small house, with a big kitchen.

In a good marriage each is the others better half.

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

I’m sure anyone who likes a good crime, provided it is not the victim.

I have a feeling that inside you somewhere, there’s somebody nobody knows about.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

I’m not against the police; I’m just afraid of them.

I can’t read fiction without visualizing every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time.

A woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing doesn’t want to go to the movies to watch a film about a woman who spends all day washing and cooking and ironing.

If it’s a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.

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.

Fear’s what puts dreams to sleep.

The mere possession of a gun is, in itself, an urge to kill, not only by design, but by accident, by madness, by fright, by bravado.

Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.

Opening your heart and being vulnerable in the face of fear is the most courageous thing you can do.

Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it–unable quite to let each other go.

Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death.

An individual who is afraid to go outdoors for fear of being hit by a meteorite is generally regarded as neurotic.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – it only hastens fools to rush in where angels fear to tread.