Orson Welles Quotes
-
'We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes...' (pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice) This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?
-
I started at the top and worked my way down.
-
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.
-
Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
-
The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
-
I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
-
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
-
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
-
Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
-
Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it - how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.
-
The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-
They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
-
Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
-
In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.
-
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
-
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
-
I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.