Orson Welles quotes

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

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

— Orson Welles

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

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

— Orson Welles

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

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

— Orson Welles

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

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

— Orson 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.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson 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.”

— Orson Welles

“In Italy, for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson 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.”

— Orson Welles

“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.”

— Orson Welles

“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?”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

“The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

— Orson Welles

“Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.”

— Orson Welles

“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.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

“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