Top 205 Quotes & Sayings by Orson Welles - Page 4

I'm a lurid character!

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.

We will sell no wine before its time.

By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment.

The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.

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'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them.

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

You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin.

Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.

If I want to pursue the art of painting - or music or writing or sculpture - it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!

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

[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts.

I drag my myth around with me.

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

It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations.

A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.

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.

As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

Six years ago, I looked at a picture of the world's greatest newspaper men. I felt like a kid in front of a candy store. Well, tonight, six years later, I got my candy - all of it. Welcome, gentlemen, to the Inquirer! Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle

There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.

I never make my mind up about anything at all, until it's over and done with.