Top 100 Welles's Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying.
Dorothy Parker
#3. I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.
Orson Welles
#4. I am the only actor who ever had to lose weight to play Orson Welles.
Christian McKay
#5. Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
Orson Welles
#6. There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
Orson Welles
#7. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.
Orson Welles
#8. Orson Welles, who said to Anita Bryant, Stop picketing me. What I said was I was a thespian. Never got a dinner!
Red Buttons
#9. You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.
Orson Welles
#10. I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.
Orson Welles
#11. 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
#12. Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
Orson Welles
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them.
Orson Welles
#16. As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.
Orson Welles
#17. Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.
Orson Welles
#18. 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
#19. Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
Orson Welles
#20. 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
#21. There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women ...
Orson Welles
#22. 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
#23. Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
Orson Welles
#24. 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
#26. I started at the top and worked my way down.
Orson Welles
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.
Orson Welles
#30. 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.
Orson Welles
#31. 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
#32. 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.
Orson Welles
#33. 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
#34. I don't think any word can explain a man's life.
Orson Welles
#35. 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
#36. I never make my mind up about anything at all, until it's over and done with.
Orson Welles
#37. 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
#38. Irwin F. Gellman's Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles,
Larry Kramer
#39. 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
#40. The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
Orson Welles
#41. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
Orson Welles
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other
Orson Welles
#45. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours.
Orson Welles
#46. 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.
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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.
Orson Welles
#50. If I could steal someone's dream myself, I'd have to go for one of Orson Welles.
Christopher Nolan
#51. 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
#52. I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.
Orson Welles
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.
Orson Welles
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
Orson Welles
#62. 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
#63. Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
Orson Welles
#64. [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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
Orson Welles
#68. Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
Orson Welles
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.
Orson Welles
#75. 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
#76. I don't take art as seriously as politics.
Orson Welles
#77. If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story - Orson Welles
Orson Welles
#78. The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.
Orson Welles
#79. 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
#80. I got that good a contract because I really didn't want to make a film.
Orson Welles
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. [Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it.
Roger Ebert
#87. 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
#88. Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn
Orson Welles
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. It isn't worth it. No money is worth this ... [walks out]
Orson Welles
#92. I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
Orson Welles
#93. The hopeless grief of those poor colored people affected me more than almost anything else.
Gideon Welles
#94. There were centuries when civilization had no theater.
Orson Welles
#95. I would rather be on the set than doing anything.
Orson Welles
#96. I fell in love with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone and Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Huston.
John Logan
#97. In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.
Orson Welles
#98. 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
#99. Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.
Orson Welles
#100. [On Orson Welles:] When I talk to him, I feel like a plant that's been watered.
Marlene Dietrich
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