Orson Welles Quotes
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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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Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.
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Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.
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People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.
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Gluttony is not a secret vice.
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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 don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.
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If everyone worked with wide-angle lenses, I'd shoot all my films in 75mm, because I believe very strongly in the possibilities of the 75mm.
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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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Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
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I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible.
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It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... walks out.
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I never said I was a genius.
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I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
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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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At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.
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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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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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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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The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
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When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
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If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
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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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Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.