Orson Welles quotes - page 4

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up. (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
I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.
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 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 very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
Orson Welles
I don't think any word can explain a man's life.
Orson Welles
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.
Orson Welles
I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.
Orson Welles
I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.
Orson Welles
We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes... (Orson Welles)
The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.
Orson Welles
If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book!
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
Each multiplex has screens allocated to each studio. The screens need filling. Studios have to create product to fill their screen, and the amount of good product is limited.
Orson Welles
I have no great message to the world.
Orson Welles
The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.
Orson Welles
In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.
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
Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.
Orson Welles
If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio. (Orson Welles)
Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.
Orson Welles
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
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 never said I was a genius.
Orson Welles