Orson Welles Quotes

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

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

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

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.

I drag my myth around with me.

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.

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

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

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

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

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

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

We will sell no wine before its time.

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

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I don't take art as seriously as politics.

I'm a lurid character!

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.

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

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

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 never said I was a genius.

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

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

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

I have no great message to the world.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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