Welles Quotes

#1. I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.

Suzan-Lori Parks

#2. As a kid I watched the Academy Awards on television and always wanted one - or several - like one of my favorite directions, John Ford. He won six. On the other hand, Orson Welles, who's on the top of my list, didn't win any. Alfred Hitchcock didn't win any. Howard Hawks didn't win any.

Martin Scorsese

#3. I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

Spencer Tracy

#4. Anyone who believes he has caught him in a fantastic lie is apt to find out that the fantastic story is the truth. And some unimportant statement, like just having bought an evening paper a half-hour ago, is the lie."

--On Orson Welles

Bernard Herrmann

#5. [On Orson Welles:] When I talk to him, I feel like a plant that's been watered.

Marlene Dietrich

#6. F For Fake is a talentless concoction of unparalleled ineptitude ... It would have been a more generous gesture to show a retrospective of old Welles films rather than remind everyone of how low his ability as a filmmaker has plummeted.

Rex Reed

#7. I fell in love with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone and Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Huston.

John Logan

#8. If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story - Orson Welles

Orson Welles

#9. [Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.

Roger Ebert

#10. Only a certain breed of actor should ever even try to work for Orson Welles. I'm glad I'm one of that breed.

Mercedes McCambridge

#11. Like so many people, I only remembered Orson Welles as this huge, fat, bearded figure selling wine in TV commercials. So whenever anyone said I looked like Orson Welles I said that I wasn't that fat, and I would get on a diet, quickly.

Christian McKay

#12. I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#13. Orson Welles, who said to Anita Bryant, Stop picketing me. What I said was I was a thespian. Never got a dinner!

Red Buttons

#14. I am the only actor who ever had to lose weight to play Orson Welles.

Christian McKay

#15. Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying.

Dorothy Parker

#16. Orson Welles was one of these people who was defying everything the doctors told him he wasn't supposed to be doing. He was really enjoying himself when he was eating what he wanted to eat.

Eartha Kitt

#17. If I could steal someone's dream myself, I'd have to go for one of Orson Welles.

Christopher Nolan

#18. Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow ... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.

Kevin Spacey

#19. The word genius was whispered into my ear the first things I ever Heard while I was still mewling in my crib, laughs Orson (Welles), so it never occured to me that I wasn't until middle age

Barbara Leaming

#20. 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

#21. Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt, and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man - and I'm in all of them.

Joseph Cotten

#22. Jonathan Lynn is one of the last actors Orsen Welles used in a production. It was wonderful. He's very sharp, very sharp. It's funny I've been asked how weird it was to have a Brit do a church gospel movie.

Cuba Gooding Jr.

#23. When Orson Welles was acting in 'Compulsion,' the director Richard Fleischer let him just take over and direct the courtroom scenes. To be able to see Welles - who knew more about directing than anyone - direct himself and the other actors, it was unbelievable and unforgettable.

Robert Osborne

#24. Orson Welles was lazy. He was a late bloomer.

Xavier Dolan

#25. I mean, everyone says Citizen Kane. It isn't that great, anyway. And Orson Welles I knew well, of course. He made other incredible films that no one would let him make, which were much better than Citizen Kane, really.

Patrick Macnee

#26. Orson Welles's second 'I-did-it' should show once and for all that film making, radio and the stage are three different guys better kept separated. 'The Magnificent Ambersons' is one of those versions of the richest family in town during the good old days.

Manny Farber

#27. I was watching Orson Welles and Jean Vigo films at a ridiculously young age.

Brady Corbet

#28. I was nine. I saw Orson Welles in 'Julius Caesar.' It was involving, emotional, imaginative. I've never forgotten it.

Harold Prince

#29. Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

Tom Shales

#30. Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man.

Vincente Minnelli

#31. I've always tried to learn from the greats: Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart, Ghandi, Buddha, Jesus ... it's just that there's this tremendous pressure to correct all the things they got wrong.

Zach Braff

#32. I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

Frank Miller

#33. Irwin F. Gellman's Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles,

Larry Kramer

#34. Forget Orson Welles, and heed Walt Whitman: "I am large, I contain multitudes."5

Ed Yong

#35. There's a para-phrase about Orson Welles saying: "Great films are made by great directors and the rest are made by everyone else." I've been very lucky ... before I start insulting the profession of directing, but I think a good director is everything and a bad director really is nothing at all.

Colin Firth

#36. I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened 'Citizen Kane' for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it.

Claire Danes

#37. It always amazed me that he was able to do it, and that Orson Welles was able to do it. I never understood it because the talents are absolutely opposite - polar opposites.

Mark Rydell

#38. Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

Kevin Wilson

#39. It was great to watch Orson Welles, not only as an actor but as a director.

Max Von Sydow

#40. I don't take art as seriously as politics.

Orson Welles

#41. A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

Orson Welles

#42. 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.

Orson Welles

#43. Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

Orson Welles

#44. 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

#45. 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.

Orson Welles

#46. 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

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#50. [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.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#54. 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

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

Orson Welles

#56. 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

#57. 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.

Orson Welles

#58. A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.

Orson Welles

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.

Orson Welles

#62. In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.

Orson Welles

#63. I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

Orson Welles

#64. There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

Orson Welles

#65. The hopeless grief of those poor colored people affected me more than almost anything else.

Gideon Welles

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

Orson Welles

#67. It isn't worth it. No money is worth this ... [walks out]

Orson Welles

#68. 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.

Orson Welles

#69. Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn

Orson Welles

#70. 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

#71. Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

Orson Welles

#72. 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.

Orson Welles

#73. 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.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#75. I got that good a contract because I really didn't want to make a film.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#77. The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#79. I started at the top and worked my way down.

Orson Welles

#80. I'm a lurid character!

Orson Welles

#81. 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

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#84. The War has been waged with success, although there have been in some instances errors and misfortunes. But the heart of the nation is sounder and its hopes brighter.

Gideon Welles

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

Orson Welles

#86. 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.

Orson Welles

#87. Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

Orson Welles

#88. As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#90. 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

#91. 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

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

Orson Welles

#93. 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.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#95. You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

#99. I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.

Orson Welles

#100. [I have a] fondness for telling stories, like the Arab storytellers on the marketplace ... I will never grow tired of [telling] stories [and] I make the mistake of thinking that everyone has the same enthusiasm!

Orson Welles