Orson Welles Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

A certain great and powerful king once asked a poet: "What can I give you of all that I have?" He wisely replied, "Anything sir... except your secret."

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
I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

Orson Welles
In 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.

Orson Welles
This theatre is your theatre. You are responsible for its creation and its progress.

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

Orson Welles
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.

Orson Welles
I have only one real enemy in my life that I know about, and that is John Houseman. Everything begins and ends with that hostility behind the mandarin benevolence.

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

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

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

Orson Welles
Mr Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn't get or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn't have explained anything. I don't think any word can explain a man's life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, a missing piece.

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

Orson Welles
The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

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

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

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

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