Top 205 Quotes & Sayings by Orson Welles

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actor Orson Welles.

Last updated on September 16, 2024.

George Orson Welles was an American director, actor, screenwriter, and producer who is remembered for his innovative work in radio, theatre and film. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time.

American - Actor | May 6, 1915 - October 10, 1985

Source: Wikipedia

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

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

Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Orson Welles

I started at the top and worked my way down.

Orson Welles

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

I have an unfortunate personality.

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

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

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

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

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

Orson Welles

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

I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

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

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

Orson Welles

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

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

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

Orson Welles

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

Orson Welles

I have no great message to the world.

Orson Welles

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

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 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

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

Orson Welles

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

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

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

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

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

Orson Welles

My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.

Orson Welles

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.

Orson Welles

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

Orson Welles

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

Orson Welles

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

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

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

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

Top 205 Quotes & Sayings by Orson Welles

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