“I am to provide the public with beneficial shocks.”

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.

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement.

For me, suspense doesn’t have any value if it’s not balanced by humor.

Luck is everything… My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.

There is nothing to winning, really. That is, if you happen to be blessed with a keen eye, an agile mind, and no scruples whatsoever.

San Francisco would be a good location for a murder mystery.

Everyone should have their mind blown once a day.

Don’t let your imagination take you by surprise.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

God loves to take people from broken backgrounds and surprise them with possibilities.

I want to top expectations. I want to blow you away.

Aliens might be surprised to learn that in a cosmos with limitless starlight, humans kill for energy sources buried in the sand.

Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.

Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.