Orson Welles Quotes

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.

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

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

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

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.

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.

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

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

I started at the top and worked my way down.

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

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

Criticism is the essence of creation.

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

I don't regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.

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.

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

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

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

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.

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.

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

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.

I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising.

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

Crooks aren't the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.

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

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

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.

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

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.

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

I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician.

I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.

In attempting to explain F For Fake's state-side failure, it has occurred to me that perhaps the subject matter was at least partially to blame, and that this country is so blissfully enslaved by the notion of the special sanctity of the expert that an overtly anti-expert film was bound to go too much against the national grain.

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.

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

[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!

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

I don't take art as seriously as politics.

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 don't want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don't think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully - not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews.

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

n Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Today I believe that man cannot escape his destiny to create whatever it is we make - jazz, a wooden spoon, or graffiti on the wall. All of these are expressions of man's creativity, proof that man has not yet been destroyed by technology. But are we making things for the people of our epoch or repeating what has been done before? And finally, is the question itself important? We must ask ourselves that. The most important thing is always to doubt the importance of the question.

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