Orson Welles Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I started at the top and worked my way down.

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

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

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.

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

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

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?

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

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

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

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

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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.

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

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

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

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

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

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

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.

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

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.

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.

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 Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it - yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

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.

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?

I've always found it very... sanitary to be broke.

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

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.

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

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

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

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

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.

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!