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

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 enjoy playing the audience like a piano.

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.

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.

I was becoming the cold, emotionally crippled monster I always wanted to be, and I wasn’t so sure I liked it. But it was too late. The metamorphosis was already well under way.

It’s emotional warfare telling the people we love, the most, the truth about ourselves.

Analysis gave me great freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. I felt I had served my time as a puppet.

The people I know that have the hardest time keeping it together emotionally are people that don’t workout.

Sentimentality is loving something more than God does.

Those who grieve find comfort in weeping and in arousing their sorrow until the body is too tired to bear the inner emotions.

If emotional pain or problems have cropped up in your life, you must insist on getting closure. Closure means you don’t carry the problem or the pain. You address the issue, then you slam shut the book and put it away.

It’s funny about men and women. Men pay in cash to get them and pay in cash to get rid of them. Women pay emotionally coming and going. Neither has it easy.