110+ Orson Welles Quotes On Politics, Visionary And Innovative

Orson Welles was an American actor, director, writer, and producer. He is most famous for his 1941 film Citizen Kane, which is often cited as one of the greatest films of all time. He was also known for his innovative use of radio and film, and for his collaborations with other filmmakers and actors. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Orson Welles on politics, visionary, innovative.

Top 10 Orson Welles Quotes

1. The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
5. The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
6. My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
7. Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
8. 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.
9. Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.
10. If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Orson Welles Image Quotes

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

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

Orson Welles Short Quotes

• Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
• 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.
• There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.
• Fake is as old as the Eden tree.
• 'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
• They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
• The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.
• I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.
• Gluttony is not a secret vice.

Orson Welles Quotes About People

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck. — Orson Welles

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

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. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

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

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose. — Orson Welles

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody. — Orson Welles

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there. — Orson Welles

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people. — Orson Welles

[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles Quotes About Hate

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

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

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

I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable. — Orson Welles

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles Quotes About Love

On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!' — Orson Welles

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. — Orson Welles

I think I made essential a mistake in staying in movies, because I - but it's a mistake I can't regret, because it's like saying, 'I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her.' — Orson Welles

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own. — Orson Welles

I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles Quotes About Years

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! — Orson Welles

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered. — Orson Welles

I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me. — Orson Welles

When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

Six years ago, I looked at a picture of the world's greatest newspaper men. I felt like a kid in front of a candy store. Well, tonight, six years later, I got my candy - all of it. Welcome, gentlemen, to the Inquirer! Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle — Orson Welles

Orson Welles Quotes About Film

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

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

Film is like a colony and there are very few colonists. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful. — Orson Welles

Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money. — Orson Welles

If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be 'Grand Illusion.' — Orson Welles

A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have. — Orson Welles

Orson Welles Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

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

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? — Orson Welles

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

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. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

We made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends. — Orson Welles

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

[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! — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

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

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

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

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows. — Orson Welles

I have an unfortunate personality. — Orson Welles

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life. — Orson Welles

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up. — Orson Welles

As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I've never heard one say, 'No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.' They will always say, 'You don't like him? I've got somebody else.' They're totally spineless. — Orson Welles

Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things. — Orson Welles

Criminals are never very amusing. It's because they're failures. Those who make real money aren't counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem. — Orson Welles

I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy. — Orson Welles

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention. — Orson Welles

I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them. — Orson Welles

I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers -- because males have got to try and justify their existence. — Orson Welles

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan. — Orson Welles

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid. — Orson Welles

A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens. — Orson Welles

I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God. — Orson Welles

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable. — Orson Welles

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations. — Orson Welles

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians. — Orson Welles

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else. — Orson Welles

I drag my myth around with me. — Orson Welles

Husbands should revolt from time to time. Even the best circus-number becomes boring if the beast is too tame. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could. — Orson Welles

I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live. — Orson Welles

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him. — Orson Welles

The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation. — Orson Welles

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them. — Orson Welles

There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze. — Orson Welles

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. — Orson Welles

We will sell no wine before its time. — Orson Welles

I don't want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don't think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully - not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews. — Orson Welles

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism. — Orson Welles

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. — Orson Welles

The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age. — Orson Welles

I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations. — Orson Welles

A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. — Orson Welles

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me. — Orson Welles

Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of. — Orson Welles

I've always found it very sanitary to be broke. — Orson Welles

The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can. — Orson Welles

Life Lessons by Orson Welles

1. Orson Welles taught us to never give up on our dreams, no matter how difficult they may seem. He pursued his passion for the arts and film-making despite the numerous obstacles he faced in his career.
2. He also showed us the importance of taking risks and not being afraid to fail. He was willing to take risks and experiment with new ideas, which led to his success.
3. Finally, Orson Welles taught us the value of hard work and dedication. He worked tirelessly to create his films, and his dedication to his craft paid off.