Top 100 Orson Welles Quotes
#1. A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.
Orson Welles
#2. 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.
Orson Welles
#3. Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.
Orson Welles
#4. Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
Orson Welles
#5. Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
Orson Welles
#6. 'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
Orson Welles
#7. 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.
Orson Welles
#8. Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.
Orson Welles
#9. A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.
Orson Welles
#10. 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.
Orson Welles
#11. 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.
Orson Welles
#12. In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.
Orson Welles
#13. I would rather be on the set than doing anything.
Orson Welles
#14. There were centuries when civilization had no theater.
Orson Welles
#15. I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
Orson Welles
#16. It isn't worth it. No money is worth this ... [walks out]
Orson Welles
#17. 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.
Orson Welles
#18. I got that good a contract because I really didn't want to make a film.
Orson Welles
#19. I started at the top and worked my way down.
Orson Welles
#20. 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.
Orson Welles
#21. Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
Orson Welles
#22. Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.
Orson Welles
#23. If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them.
Orson Welles
#24. 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.
Orson Welles
#25. I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.
Orson Welles
#26. Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
Orson Welles
#27. I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.
Orson Welles
#28. You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.
Orson Welles
#29. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.
Orson Welles
#30. There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
Orson Welles
#31. I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.
Orson Welles
#32. 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!
Orson Welles
#33. I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.
Orson Welles
#34. I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
Orson Welles
#35. 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?
Orson Welles
#36. I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.
Orson Welles
#37. I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.
Orson Welles
#38. I look back on my life and it's 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It's no way to live.
Orson Welles
#39. 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.
Orson Welles
#40. 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.
Orson Welles
#41. 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.
Orson Welles
#42. The basic and essential human is the woman.
Orson Welles
#43. 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.
Orson Welles
#45. The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.
Orson Welles
#46. The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
Orson Welles
#47. 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.
Orson Welles
#48. What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other
Orson Welles
#49. I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them.
Orson Welles
#50. 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.
Orson Welles
#51. In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.
Orson Welles
#52. 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.
Orson Welles
#53. Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.
Orson Welles
#54. A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.
Orson Welles
#55. I much prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.
Orson Welles
#57. Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.
Orson Welles
#58. Husbands should revolt from time to time. Even the best circus-number becomes boring if the beast is too tame.
Orson Welles
#59. 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.'
Orson Welles
#60. 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.
Orson Welles
#61. A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.
Orson Welles
#62. I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
Orson Welles
#63. It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations.
Orson Welles
#64. 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.
Orson Welles
#65. 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.
Orson Welles
#66. Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.
Orson Welles
#67. Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money.
Orson Welles
#68. There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.
Orson Welles
#69. The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.
Orson Welles
#70. I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.
Orson Welles
#71. 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.
Orson Welles
#72. They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
Orson Welles
#73. The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
Orson Welles
#74. Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.
Orson Welles
#75. Roosevelt used to say, You and I are the two best actors in America.
Orson Welles
#76. Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.
Orson Welles
#77. 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.
Orson Welles
#79. I never make my mind up about anything at all, until it's over and done with.
Orson Welles
#80. The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.
Orson Welles
#81. I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.
Orson Welles
#82. You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin.
Orson Welles
#83. Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.
Orson Welles
#84. The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can.
Orson Welles
#85. The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.
Orson Welles
#87. I don't think any word can explain a man's life.
Orson Welles
#88. Hollywood is Hollywood. There's nothing you can say about it that isn't true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter - you're the one who sat down, and joined the game.
Orson Welles
#89. I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising.
Orson Welles
#90. I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.
Orson Welles
#91. Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.
Orson Welles
#92. My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
Orson Welles
#93. I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.
Orson Welles
#94. Working is part of life, I don't know how to distinguish between the two ... Work is an expression of life.
Orson Welles
#95. 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.
Orson Welles
#96. Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.
Orson Welles
#97. 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.
Orson Welles
#98. I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional - and I hate every kind of snob.
Orson Welles
#99. Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle.
Orson Welles
#100. 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.
Orson Welles
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