Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

All stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they're stereotypes because they're true.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.