104 Inspiring Quotes by Orson Welles

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

I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

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

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

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

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.

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.

I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.

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

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

I have an unfortunate personality.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

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 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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.

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.'

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 no great message to the world.

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.

Everybody denies I am a genius -- but nobody ever called me one!

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

We will sell no wine before its time.

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.

In attempting to explain F For Fake's state-side failure, it has occurred to me that perhaps the subject matter was at least partially to blame, and that this country is so blissfully enslaved by the notion of the special sanctity of the expert that an overtly anti-expert film was bound to go too much against the national grain.

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

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

I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.

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

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.

If I want to pursue the art of painting -- or music or writing or sculpture -- it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!

My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.

I don't think any word can explain a man's life.

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

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.

I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.

We made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

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

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

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

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

Six years ago, I looked at a picture of the world's greatest newspaper men. I felt like a kid in front of a candy store. Well, tonight, six years later, I got my candy -- all of it. Welcome, gentlemen, to the Inquirer! Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle.

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

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.

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!

It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations.

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

I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them.

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

There are no villains who doesn't have his reasons.

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.

Many would never speak with a full mouth, but do it with an empty head.

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.

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.

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

I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician.

I drag my myth around with me.

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.

The basic and essential human is the woman.

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.

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

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.

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

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

A woman with her hair turned up always looks as if she were going some place either to the opera or the shower bath.

In Italy for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteen century inventented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee -- may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.

If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them.

I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

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