Quotes

“I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling It's no way to spend a life.” Orson Welles

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

“Fake is as old as the Eden tree.” Orson Welles

“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.'” Orson Welles

“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.” Orson 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.” Orson Welles

“Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.” Orson Welles

“Gluttony is not a secret vice.” Orson Welles

“The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.” Orson Welles

“Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.” Orson Welles

“I started at the top and worked my way down.” Orson Welles

“Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.” Orson Welles

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

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

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

“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.” 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

“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

“I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.” Orson Welles

“I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.” Orson Welles

“If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them.” Orson Welles

“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.” Orson Welles

“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.” Orson Welles

“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.” Orson Welles

“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.” Orson Welles

“I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.” Orson Welles

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

“They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.” Orson Welles

“When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.” Orson Welles