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. (Orson Welles)
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
Orson Welles
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
Orson Welles
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.
Orson Welles
Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
Orson Welles
Gluttony is not a secret vice.
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
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
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
I try to be a Christian...I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.
Orson Welles
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him. (Orson Welles)
A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
Orson Welles
I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.
Orson Welles
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo daVinci 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
Men created civilization only to impress their girl friends.
Orson Welles
I don't take art as seriously as politics.
Orson Welles
Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.
Orson Welles
Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
Orson Welles
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
Orson Welles
The people who've done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] - who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don't succeed - people who've had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever - are the people who didn't want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn't want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.
Orson Welles
It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]. (Orson Welles)
That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with "in" and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say "In July" and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me for saying so. It's just stupid... "In July"; I'd love to know how you emphasize "In" in "In July". Impossible! Meaningless!
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
Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian.
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