Anticipation! It occurred to him that his anticipation was more pleasant to him than the experiencing.

one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

One situation – maybe one alone – could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness.

How easy it was to lie when one had to lie!

I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter

This is what I like, sitting at a table and watching people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.

They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.