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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
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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
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"We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes..." (pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice) This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?
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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
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I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising.
Orson Welles
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The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.
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A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.
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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.
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When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.
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Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soap companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
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I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
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But you can't emphasize "beef", that's like his wanting me to emphasize "in" before "July"! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!
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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.
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A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.
Orson Welles
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Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
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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.
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A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows — his own.
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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.
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Let's face it. Jazz has made some dangerous friends. There's something of the opium eater in your jazz cultist. His enthusiasm affects him like a drug habit, removing him, it seems, from the uninitiated and less paranoid world about him and encouraging many of the attitudes of full-blown megalomania.
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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
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I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.
Orson Welles
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I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts. To quote from my script for The Dreamers, never expect justice in the 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 get good luck or bad luck.
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Old age: It's the only disease you don't look forward to being cured of.
Orson Welles
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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.
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Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Orson Welles
Creative Commons
Born:
May 6, 1915
Died:
October 10, 1985
(aged 70)
Bio:
George Orson Welles was an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film.
Known for:
Citizen Kane (1941)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Chimes at Midnight (1965)
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
The Trial (1962)
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