“In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between.”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“To reproach Hitchcock for specializing in suspense is to accuse him of being the least boring of filmmakers; it is also tantamount to blaming a lover who instead of concentrating on his own pleasure insists on sharing it with his partner.”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“The camera should never anticipate what’s about to follow.”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“Nowadays, the work of Alfred Hitchcock is admired all over the world. Young people who are just discovering his art through the current rerelease of Rear Window and Vertigo, or through North by Northwest, may assume his prestige has always been recognized, but this is far from being the case.
In the fifties and sixties, Hitchcock was at the height of his creativity and popularity. He was, of course, famous due to the publicity masterminded by producer David O. Selznick during the six or seven years of their collaboration on such films as Rebecca, Notorious, Spellbound, and The Paradine Case.
His fame had spread further throughout the world via the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents in the mid-fifties. But American and European critics made him pay for his commercial success by reviewing his work with condescension, and by belittling each new film.
(...)
In examining his films, it was obvious that he had given more thought to the potential of his art than any of his colleagues. It occurred to me that if he would, for the first time, agree to respond seriously to a systematic questionnaire, the resulting document might modify the American critics’ approach to Hitchcock.
That is what this book is all about.”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“That’s because the theme of the innocent man being accused, I feel, provides the audience with a greater sense of danger. It’s easier for them to identify with him than with a guilty man on the run. I always take the audience into account.”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“gatherings I would sit quietly in a corner, saying nothing. I looked and observed a good deal. I’ve always been that way and still am. I was anything but expansive. I was a loner—can’t remember ever”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“Suspense is simply the dramatization of a film’s narrative, or if you will, the most intense presentation possible of dramatic situations.”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film.”
― François Truffaut, quote from Hitchcock
“YOU aren't any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You're just yourself, aren't you? What difference does it make what grade you're in? And what's the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don't know your multiplication table?”
― Dorothy Canfield Fisher, quote from Understood Betsy
“That he didn’t demand to know why she was so upset and stupid won the guy so many brownie points, he could have led every Girl Scout troop in the contiguous forty-eight states.”
― Olivia Cunning, quote from Wicked Beat
“Ibland är det bara nära vänner som kan förstå vad vi försöker få sagt. Nån som vi ofta har varit tillsammans med och som lyssnar noga på vad det är som vi försöker säga, och som försöker förstå (s. 220).”
― Cressida Cowell, quote from How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse
“You know how it is. Mean girls get mean in seventh grade and they stay that way until your ten-year reunion, when they want to be best friends again.”
― Julie Buxbaum, quote from Tell Me Three Things
“There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed to not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.”
― Joanna Russ, quote from The Female Man
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