Literary Birthday – 13 August – Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was born on 13 August 1899 and died on 29 April 1980.

Alfred Hitchcock Quotes

1. To make a great film you need three things – the script, the script and the script.
2. Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. That story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human.
3. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out?
4. There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
5. The English use a lot of imagination with their crimes. I don’t get such a kick out of anything as much as out of imagining a crime. When I’m writing a story and I come to a crime, I think happily: now wouldn’t it be nice to have him die like this?
6. Really, the novelist has the best casting since he doesn’t have to cope with the actors and all the rest.
7. I’m a writer and, therefore, automatically a suspicious character.
8. Mystery is an intellectual process… But suspense is essentially an emotional process.
9. The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture.
10. Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf. What frightens us today is exactly the same sort of thing that frightened us yesterday.
11. Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
12. I can’t read fiction without visualising every scene. The result is it becomes a series of pictures rather than a book.
13. Self-plagiarism is style.
14. My suspense work comes out of creating nightmares for the audience. And I play with an audience. I make them gasp and surprise them and shock them. When you have a nightmare, it’s awfully vivid if you’re dreaming that you’re being led to the electric chair. Then you’re as happy as can be when you wake up because you’re relieved.
15. We try to tell a good story and develop a hefty plot. Themes emerge as we go along.
16. Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
17. Ideas come from everything.

Alfred Hitchcock was an English film director and producer. He was also a master storyteller who worked closely with screenwriters on his films. He typically had his writing collaborators—his wife Alma and Joan Harrison—create an outline. Then he hired screenwriters to polish it. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. His ability to build suspense and engage audiences through visual storytelling has made him a pivotal figure in the history of cinema. He directed over 50 feature films over six decades, many of which are still widely watched and studied today. He was known as the ‘Master of Suspense’. The Hitchcockian style includes the use of editing and camera movement to mimic a person’s gaze, turning viewers into voyeurs, and framing shots to maximise anxiety and fear. Hitchcock was appointed a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the 1980 New Year Honours.

Read 6 Things Alfred Hitchcock Can Teach You About Writing

Source for Image: Ante Brkan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hitchcock,_Alfred_02.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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