I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

I, you know, am all over the place — every category of pictures I have made, good, bad or indifferent. I could not make, like Hitchcock did, one Hitchcock picture after another. … I wanted to do a Hitchcock picture, so I did `Witness for the Prosecution,’ then I was bored with it, so I moved on.

I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.

A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.

If you don't like what you're doing, it's unlikely anyone else will either, so be sure you are happy with your own work first.

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

What critics call dirty in our pictures, they call lusty in foreign films.