Orson Welles Quotes

63 Sourced Quotes

The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.

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

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

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

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

Orson Welles
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!

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 policeman's job is only easy in a police state.

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

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
A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows — his own.

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
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.

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

Orson Welles
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.

Orson Welles
Old age: It's the only disease you don't look forward to being cured of.

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

Orson Welles
One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden…Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D. W. Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.

Orson Welles
As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.

Orson Welles
You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. "Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp" Ooh, "crumb-crisp coating." Ahh, that's tough, "crumb-crisp coating." I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written.

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

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
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.

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
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
Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, strange beings who landed in New Jersey tonight are the vanguard of an invading army from Mars.

Orson Welles
I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.

Orson Welles