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Quotes by Orson Welles

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
– Orson Welles
A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
– Orson Welles
At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.
– Orson Welles
Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
– Orson Welles
Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
– Orson Welles
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
– Orson Welles
Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
– Orson Welles
Fake is as old as the Eden tree.
– Orson Welles
Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
– Orson Welles
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
I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
– Orson Welles
I don't say that we ought to all misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
– Orson Welles
I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.
– Orson Welles
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
I have an unfortunate personality.
– Orson Welles
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
I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
– Orson Welles
I started at the top and worked my way down.
– Orson Welles
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
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
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
– Orson Welles
In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
– Orson Welles
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
– Orson Welles
Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.
– Orson Welles
Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
– Orson Welles
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
Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
– Orson Welles
Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
– Orson Welles
The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
– Orson Welles
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.
– Orson Welles
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
– Orson Welles
The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.
– Orson Welles
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
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
The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.
– Orson Welles
The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.
– Orson Welles
They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
– Orson Welles
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
When you are down and out something always turns up-and it is usually the noses of your friends.
– Orson Welles
I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
– Orson Welles
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
Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.
– Orson Welles
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
– Orson Welles
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
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