"When I married, I was a virgin, I promise you, and sex has never interested me much. I don’t understand how people can waste so much time over sex: sex is for kids, for movies, a great bore." --- Alfred Hitchcock Full Excerpt: "Hitchcock: I’m sixty-four now, and I can swear that I’ve never known any woman other than my wife—neither before nor since our marriage. When I married, I was a virgin, I promise you, and sex has never interested me much. I don’t understand how people can waste so much time over sex: sex is for kids, for movies, a great bore. And since I’ve always avoided anything boring.. [remember the day I had to write the screenplay for the movie 'Woman to Woman' (1923): the story of a man who has a mistress in Paris who bangs his head, loses his memory, and starts going with another woman, who gives him a child. Well, I was twenty-three years old, I’d never been with a woman, and I didn’t have the slightest idea what a woman did to have a child. I had even less idea what a man did when he was with his mistress in Paris or when he was with another woman who was giving him a child. And so... Interviewer: Now you know, Mr. Hitchcock? Hitchcock: Now I know. I have a daughter of thirty-five and three little grandchildren. Between you and me, I’m a grandfather. Still, when I think that my daughter was born when I was nearly thirty, and it was only then that I realized that babies aren’t found under gooseberry bushes. You won’t believe it—no one ever believes it, they say it’s an act to make myself a character—but until I was twenty-four, I had never tasted a drop of alcohol; until I was twenty- five, I had never smoked a cigar. I was very shy, more shy than I am today. If people told dirty stories, I used to blush like a rose. So my friends would always tell them when I wasn’t there, and if I arrived, they’d say, “Silence, Hitchcock’s coming.” As for my wife, I married her because she asked me to. We’d been traveling around and working together for years, and I’d never so much as touched her little finger. Interviewer: But why on earth? Don’t you like women, Mr. Hitchcock? Hitchcock: Indeed I like them, more than men. In point of fact, I feel less shy with them than with men. For example, I could never talk like this to a man. But I like them to talk to, to dine with, not for sexual reasons. When people ask me, “Mr. Hitchcock, why are the stars in your movies always blondes? Is it because you have a weakness for blondes?” I tell them I don’t know, it must be coincidence or the fact that they are ladies; I’ve thought since I was a child that ladies are blonde, my wife is blonde. I don’t have a weakness for anyone, neither for blondes nor redheads nor brunettes nor sexy women... You know who are the sexiest women, I mean the most wrapped up in sex? Nordic women. Evidently the cold makes them hot. Consider Englishwomen: they all look like schoolmistresses, but heaven help the poor fellow who finds himself in a taxi with one. At best he’ll get out of it minus his clothes. Interviewer: Forgive my asking, but how do you know these things, Mr. Hitchcock? Hitchcock: What a question! I listen to what people say, I find out about things. Obviously the information is secondhand. Scientists know that if you mix one powder with another powder, you'll be blown up. But they don’t have to be blown up in order to know it." (Alfred Hitchcock's interview with Oriana Fallaci, 1963) Clip from: North by Northwest (1959) Director: Alfred Hitchcock