Quotes by 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

Love

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

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

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

— Orson Welles

Happiness

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

Wisdom

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

Love

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

Friendship

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

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

Love

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

Success

The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

— Orson Welles

Success

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

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

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

Success

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

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

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

Truth

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.

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

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

Wisdom

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

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

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

— Orson Welles

Life

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

Friendship

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

— Orson Welles

Wisdom

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.

— Orson Welles

Wisdom