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
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.
Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
I have an unfortunate personality.
Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
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.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
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.
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?
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.
I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
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.
I started at the top and worked my way down.
When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Gluttony is not a secret vice.
Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.
I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.
When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.
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.
I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
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.
Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.
Fake is as old as the Eden tree.
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.
On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!'
The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.
If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.
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.
I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.
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.
Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.
Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
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.
Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
