Orson Welles quotes

I started at the top and worked my way down.
-- Orson Welles

#Way #My Way

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

#Successful #Unique #Design

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

#Tough #Bigs #Modest

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

#Hate #Race #Human Nature

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

#Life #Girlfriend #Order

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

#Happiness #Optimistic #Writing

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

#Food #Health #Weight Loss

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

#Women #Coffee #Three

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

#Love #Life #Depressing

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

#Looks

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

#Country #Food #Lunch

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.
-- Orson Welles

#Artist #Firsts #Essentials

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

#Inspirational #Funny #Friends

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

#Artist #Should #Isolated

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

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

#Photography #World #Messages

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

#Travel #Two #Boredom

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

#Accomplishment #Experiments

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.
-- Orson Welles

#Song #War #Fall

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

#Law #People #Normal

In 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.
-- Orson Welles

#Love #Life #Peace

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.
-- Orson Welles

#Two #Eight #Hustle

The basic and essential human is the woman.
-- Orson Welles

Gluttony is not a secret vice.
-- Orson Welles

#Secret #Vices #Dieting

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

#Army #Artist #Needs

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

#Money #Thinking #Sake

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

#Jobs #Night #Yawning

I have an unfortunate personality.
-- Orson Welles

#Personality #Unfortunate

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

#Movie #Eye #Cameras

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
-- Orson Welles

#Inspirational #Art #Creativity

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

#Dream #Ribbons #Cinema

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

#Hate #Great Love #People

A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.
-- Orson Welles

#Army #Needs #Directors

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

#Ducks #Election #Politician

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.
-- Orson Welles

#Fake People #Eden #Tree

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

#College #Pie #Today

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

#Giving #Theatre #Hints

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

#Life #Luxury #Lap

Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.
-- Orson Welles

#Games #Down And #Hollywood

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

#Age #Genius #Ears

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

#Time #Hate #Thinking

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

#Stupid #Thinking #Simple

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

#Writing #Actors #Directors

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.
-- Orson Welles

#Lying #Believe #Thinking

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

#Names #Gentleman #Directors

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
-- Orson Welles

#Hollywood #Invention #Gangsters

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?
-- Orson Welles

#Marijuana #Light #Texas

A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.
-- Orson Welles

#Boys #Men #Two

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

#Birthday #Twenties

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

#Driving #Hours #Frightened

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

#Truth #White #Feelings

I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.
-- Orson Welles

#Sex #Hate #Hands