Top 205 Quotes & Sayings by Orson Welles - Page 2

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

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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 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.

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

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.

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.

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

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.

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.

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

One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.

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

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

Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.

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 never said I was a genius.

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.

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

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

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.

I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Working is part of life, I don't know how to distinguish between the two... Work is an expression of life.

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.

A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.

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.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out

I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

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.

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

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.