Orson Welles Quotes
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I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
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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.
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I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible.
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When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
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I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.
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I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.
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Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
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When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.
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I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.
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I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
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I spend... twenty times more for you people than any other commercial I've ever made. You are such pests! Now what is it you want? In your... depths of your ignorance, what is it you want? Whatever it is you want, I can't deliver, 'cause I just don't see it.
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The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
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It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... walks out.
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I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.
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If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
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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?
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Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.
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I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.
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As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.
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At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.
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One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.
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Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation. If you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surfboard.
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My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
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Men created civilization only to impress their girl friends