Orson Welles
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.Collection: Dating
Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.Collection: Dating
Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.Collection: Famous
Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.Collection: Good
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Christmas
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.Collection: Alone
The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.Collection: Society
I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.Collection: Movies
I have an unfortunate personality.Collection: Funny
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.Collection: Diet
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.Collection: Movies
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.Collection: Movies
Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.Collection: Politics
When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.Collection: Society
Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
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.
I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
I started at the top and worked my way down.
I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.
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.
Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.
The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
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.
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 have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.
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.
Gluttony is not a secret vice.
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 hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.
Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
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.
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.'
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.
Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.
The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.
I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
I have no great message to the world.
My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.