Orson Welles

Welles: I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but over its treatment of Griffith, Von Sternberg, Von Stroheim, Buster Keaton and a hundred others.

Welles: (On Citizen Kane being colorized) Keep Ted Turner and his damn Crayola crayons away from my movie.

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

Welles: 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.

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

Welles: The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.

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

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.

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

Welles: The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

Welles: The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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.

Welles: The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.

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

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

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

Welles: Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

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

Welles: If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

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.

Welles: I started at the top and worked my way down.

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

Welles: I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

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

Welles: I don't say that we ought to all misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

Welles: I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.

Welles: I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

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

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

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

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

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

Orson Welles: In Italy for 30 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, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Orson Welles: I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.

Orson Welles: Gluttony is not a secret vice.

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