Orson Welles Quotes

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.

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

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.

The essential is to excite the spectators.

If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

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.

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband.

If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

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.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

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.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

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.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

When you are down and out something always turns up -- and it is usually the noses of your friends.

A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day.

We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike.

I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.

Never expect justice in this world. That is not part of God's plan. Everybody thinks that if they don't get it, they're some kind of odd man out. And it's not true. Nobody gets justice - people just get good luck or bad luck.

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?

They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.

Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore.

I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right!

I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.

We made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

Ignorance sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful.

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

[I have a] fondness for telling stories, like the Arab storytellers on the marketplace. ... I will never grow tired of [telling] stories [and] I make the mistake of thinking that everyone has the same enthusiasm!

I don't think any word can explain a man's life.

Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

Crooks aren't the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.

I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional - and I hate every kind of snob.