Top 50 Orson Welles Quotes

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?

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.

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I never said I was a genius.

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

Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.

Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Only very intelligent people don’t wish they were in politics, and I’m dumb enough to want to be in there.

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

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.

I have no great message to the world.

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

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

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

I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.

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

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

As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I’ve never heard one say, ‘No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.’ They will always say, ‘You don’t like him? I’ve got somebody else.’ They’re totally spineless.

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

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.’

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

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

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.

The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don’t mean a conceit of the producer.

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.

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

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 have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I’m not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I’m no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

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.

I have an unfortunate personality.

I don’t like television when it gets near to photographed plays.

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

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

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

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

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.