206 Top Quotes By Orson Welles That Will Touch Your Heart

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.

  

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

  

I drag my myth around with me.

  

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

  

If I had only one film in the world to save, it would be 'Grand Illusion.'

  

Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.

  

Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.

  

The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can.

  

The basic and essential human is the woman.

  

I don't regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.

  

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

  

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

  

We will sell no wine before its time.

  

I never make my mind up about anything at all, until it's over and done with.

  

A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.

  

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

  

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.

  

I don't take art as seriously as politics.

  

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'm a lurid character!

Character

  

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.

  

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

  

[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.

  

You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin.

  

Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money.

  

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

  

When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't.

  

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

  

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

  

I must be sincere towards what I am. ... Experimenting is the only thing that fills me with enthusiasm. ... It is the only sphere where I feel really honest and sincere.

  

I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising.

  

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.

  

By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment.

  

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

  

FDR used to say, 'You and I are the two best actors in America'.

  

There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.

  

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness.

  

I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have.

  

Criticism is the essence of creation.

  

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

  

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

  

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

  

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

  

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

  

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

  

I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.

  

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

  

In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.

  

A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.

  

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

  

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.

  

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.

  

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

  

It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]

  

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

  

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

  

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

  

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

Singing

  

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'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.

  

A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.

  

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

  

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 hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

  

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.

Trying

  

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

  

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.

  

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.

  

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

  

[I have a] fondness for telling stories, like the Arab storytellers on the marketplace. ... I will never grow tired of [telling] stories [and] I make the mistake of thinking that everyone has the same enthusiasm!

  

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

  

Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their 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.

  

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

Trying

  

Ignorance sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It's only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful.

  

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

  

There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

  

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

  

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

  

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

  

The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.

  

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

  

Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore.

  

I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.

  

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

  

Working is part of life, I don't know how to distinguish between the two... Work is an expression of life.

  

A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

  

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

  

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.

Life

  

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

  

I prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out

  

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.

Life

  

Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

  

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.