Orson Welles Quotes

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The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

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 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 never said I was a genius.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 have no great message to the world.

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

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

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

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 started at the top and worked my way down.

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

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.

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

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

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.

I have an unfortunate personality.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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