Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all 'pictures of people talking' - as, indeed, most of them are.

Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

I don't have any experience with film schools. I suspect that they're useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit. Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.

Train yourself for a profession that does not exist.

In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.