Orson Welles Quotations

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.

On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!''

I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.

I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.

Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.

Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.

In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.

They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

Film is like a colony and there are very few colonists.

As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I've never heard one say, 'No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.' They will always say, 'You don't like him? I've got somebody else.' They're totally spineless.

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

If everyone worked with wide-angle lenses, I'd shoot all my films in 75mm, because I believe very strongly in the possibilities of the 75mm.

I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it - how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.

If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.

I think I made essential a mistake in staying in movies, because I - but it's a mistake I can't regret, because it's like saying, 'I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her.'

I have no great message to the world.

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

The first thing one must remember about film is that it is a young medium. And it is essential for every responsible artist to cultivate the ground that has been left fallow.

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

Each multiplex has screens allocated to each studio. The screens need filling. Studios have to create product to fill their screen, and the amount of good product is limited.

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.

I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.

My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.

Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.

Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them.

One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.

Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't.

I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.

I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising.

You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.