Orson Welles Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Orson Welles.

Quotes About Orson Welles

Enjoy collection of 100 Orson Welles quotes. Download and share images of famous quotes about Orson Welles. Righ click to see and save pictures of Orson Welles quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.

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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I mean, everyone says Citizen Kane. It isn't that great, anyway. And Orson Welles I knew well, of course. He made other incredible films that no one would let him make, which were much better than Citizen Kane, really. ~ Patrick Macnee
Orson Welles quotes by Patrick Macnee
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I don't take art as seriously as politics. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I got that good a contract because I really didn't want to make a film. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I've always found it very sanitary to be broke. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Fake is as old as the Eden tree. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by 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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by 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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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! ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
It isn't worth it. No money is worth this ... [walks out] ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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)) ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by 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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Orson Welles, who said to Anita Bryant, Stop picketing me. What I said was I was a thespian. Never got a dinner! ~ Red Buttons
Orson Welles quotes by Red Buttons
As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
On my tombstone, I want written, 'He never did 'Love Boat! ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional - and I hate every kind of snob. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Roosevelt used to say, You and I are the two best actors in America. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
It always amazed me that he was able to do it, and that Orson Welles was able to do it. I never understood it because the talents are absolutely opposite - polar opposites. ~ Mark Rydell
Orson Welles quotes by Mark Rydell
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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! ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be 'Grand Illusion.' ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I always had this childhood image in the back of my mind of this fantastic place where all the things I liked came from; Orson Welles, jazz, all that stuff. Los Angeles is one of those places where somebodies become nobodies and nobodies become somebody. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Orson Welles quotes by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Wild Times
Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920's and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were "Fellow Travelers" and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party's existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, "Frida," who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico. ~ Hank Bracker
Orson Welles quotes by Hank Bracker
Orson Welles was a force of nature, who just came in and wiped the slate clean. And Citizen Kane is the greatest risk-taking of all time in film. I don't think anything had even seen anything quite like it. The photography was also unlike anything we'd seen. The odd coldness of the filmmaker towards the character reflects his own egomania and power, and yet a powerful empathy for all of them
it's very interesting. It still holds up, and it's still shocking. It takes storytelling and throws it up in the air. ~ Martin Scorsese
Orson Welles quotes by Martin Scorsese
There's a para-phrase about Orson Welles saying: "Great films are made by great directors and the rest are made by everyone else." I've been very lucky ... before I start insulting the profession of directing, but I think a good director is everything and a bad director really is nothing at all. ~ Colin Firth
Orson Welles quotes by Colin Firth
My toils in the quotation field have led me to formulate two or three laws about the way people use and abuse quotations. My first law is: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw - which I don't mean to be taken literally, but as a general observation of the habit people have of attaching remarks to the nearest obvious speaker. Churchill, Wilde, Orson Welles and Alexander Woollcott are other useful figures upon whom to father remarks when you don't know who really said them. ~ Nigel Rees
Orson Welles quotes by Nigel Rees
What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Gluttony is not a secret vice. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I must be sincere towards what I am ... Experimenting is the only thing that fills me with enthusiasm ... It is the only sphere where I feel really honest and sincere. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story - Orson Welles ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I am the only actor who ever had to lose weight to play Orson Welles. ~ Christian McKay
Orson Welles quotes by Christian McKay
The absence of limitations is the enemy of art. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man. ~ Walker Percy
Orson Welles quotes by Walker Percy
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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
One should make movies innocently - the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden ... Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W.Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Mum worked as a secretary for Orson Welles for what sounded like a very miserable year. Her brother was the actor Jeremy Brett, who became famous for playing Sherlock Holmes. He was an absolutely lovely man. Very exciting and glamorous, he'd always make me feel amazing and full of confidence, like I'd picked the right thing to do in life. ~ Martin Clunes
Orson Welles quotes by Martin Clunes
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
As a kid I watched the Academy Awards on television and always wanted one - or several - like one of my favorite directions, John Ford. He won six. On the other hand, Orson Welles, who's on the top of my list, didn't win any. Alfred Hitchcock didn't win any. Howard Hawks didn't win any. ~ Martin Scorsese
Orson Welles quotes by Martin Scorsese
[On Orson Welles:] When I talk to him, I feel like a plant that's been watered. ~ Marlene Dietrich
Orson Welles quotes by Marlene Dietrich
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
[Orson Welles] was a man who made the greatest film ever made and was never forgiven for it. ~ Roger Ebert
Orson Welles quotes by Roger Ebert
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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one! ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I have no great message to the world. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Many would never speak with a full mouth, but do it with an empty head ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I never make my mind up about anything at all, until it's over and done with. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by 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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
The word genius was whispered into my ear the first things I ever Heard while I was still mewling in my crib, laughs Orson (Welles), so it never occured to me that I wasn't until middle age ~ Barbara Leaming
Orson Welles quotes by Barbara Leaming
I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by 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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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
Orson Welles quotes by 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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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
Orson Welles quotes by 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
Orson Welles quotes by 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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I've always tried to learn from the greats: Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart, Ghandi, Buddha, Jesus ... it's just that there's this tremendous pressure to correct all the things they got wrong. ~ Zach Braff
Orson Welles quotes by Zach Braff
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
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm
not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the
vulgarian. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
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. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
Of Orson Welles: It's like meeting God without dying. ~ Dorothy Parker
Orson Welles quotes by Dorothy Parker
Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt, and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man - and I'm in all of them. ~ Joseph Cotten
Orson Welles quotes by Joseph Cotten
My definition of success is not having things thrown at me! ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford. ~ Orson Welles
Orson Welles quotes by Orson Welles
F For Fake Quotes «
» Love And Hate Quotes