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.
-
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
-
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 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.
-
I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
-
The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
-
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-
The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
-
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
-
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.
-
Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
-
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 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.
-
Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
-
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
-
Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
-
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
-
They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
-
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.
-
On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!'