Orson Welles Quotes

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!

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.

If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story - Orson Welles

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.

The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

[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.

You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.

Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.

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

The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

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

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.

I got that good a contract because I really didn't want to make a film.

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.

I knew all about the importance of dressmakers, because I'd spent my childhood with a woman permanently torn between the necessity of possessing beautiful clothes and the difficulty of paying for them.

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.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

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.

I have an unfortunate personality.

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.

It isn't worth it. No money is worth this ... [walks out]

Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be avoided? An actor's voice always has the same timbre and, consequently, he repeats himself. It is the same for a singer, a painter ... There are always certain things that come back, for they are part of one's personality, of one's style. If these things didn't come into play, a personality would be so complex that it would become impossible to identify it.
It is not my intention to repeat myself, but in my work there should certainly be references to what I have done in the past. Say what you will, but The Trial is the best film I ever made ... I have never been so happy as when I made this film.
(talking about directing, The Trial (1962) - from Orson Welles: Interviews (book))

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

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right!

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies ... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

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

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

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

If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be 'Grand Illusion.'

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The basic and essential human is the woman.

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

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

Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Many would never speak with a full mouth, but do it with an empty head

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

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.

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

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've always found it very sanitary to be broke.

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?

Even if I'd stayed [in the US to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons'] I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.

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

There are no villains who doesn't have his reasons.

[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 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.'

Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle.

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

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

I have no great message to the world.

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

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?

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.

Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.

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

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

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

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

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

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.

You [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema ... Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.

I don't take art as seriously as politics.

That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with "in" and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say
"In July" and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me for saying so. It's just stupid ... "In July"; I'd love to know how you emphasize "In" in "In July". Impossible!
Meaningless!

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.

I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional - and I hate every kind of snob.

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.

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

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

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