I would almost say that the best screen actor is the man who can do nothing extremely well.

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.

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

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.

I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theater - and it has to be filled.

There is nothing so good as a burial at sea. It is simple, tidy, and not very incriminating.

I'm not much into rear window ethics.