Orson Welles quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.'

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

  • The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

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

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

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

  • I started at the top and worked my way down.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • [The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.

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

  • 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.

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

  • There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women...

  • Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.

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

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

  • My definition of success is not having things thrown at me!

  • 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.

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

  • 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 love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional - and I hate every kind of snob.

  • Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

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

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

  • The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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

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

  • Gluttony is not a secret vice.

  • I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.

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

  • I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it - yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

  • I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

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

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

  • Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.

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

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

  • I drag my myth around with me.

  • A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.

  • The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

  • Ignorance sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful.

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

  • 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.

  • The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

  • One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden...Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.

  • Viele Menschen sind gut erzogen, um nicht mit vollem Mund zu sprechen, aber sie haben keine Bedenken, es mit leerem Kopf zu tun.

  • 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.

  • What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

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

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

  • A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.

  • 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.

  • I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.

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

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

  • There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.

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

  • I have an unfortunate personality.

  • I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right!

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

  • The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.

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

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

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

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

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

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

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

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

  • 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 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.

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

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

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

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

  • I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

  • 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.

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

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

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

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

  • My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?

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

  • Never expect justice in this world. That is not part of God's plan. Everybody thinks that if they don't get it, they're some kind of odd man out. And it's not true. Nobody gets justice - people just get good luck or bad luck.

  • I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out

  • There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

  • The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

  • Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore.

  • I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

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