Orson welles quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness.

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

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.

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

We will sell no wine before its time.

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

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

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

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

The basic and essential human is the woman.

I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible.

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.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

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.

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.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.

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.

Even if I'd stayed [in the US to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons'] I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.

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

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

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.

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.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

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

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

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.

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

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.

One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.

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

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

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

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

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

My definition of success is not having things thrown at me!

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.

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

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.'

Criticism is the essence of creation.

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

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

A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

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!

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

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

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.

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.

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.

A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.

. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.

[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!

Working is part of life, I don't know how to distinguish between the two... Work is an expression of life.

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.

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

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.

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 started at the top and worked my way down.

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

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

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out

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.

Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.

Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.

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.

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

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.

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

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

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

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

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.

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

Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.

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

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

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.

I have an unfortunate personality.

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

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.

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

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

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.

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

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.

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

My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?

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.

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

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

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

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

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

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?

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

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

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.

n Italy for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

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

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

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.

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

It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]