Orson Welles quotes

“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

“I have an unfortunate personality. I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.”

— Orson Welles

“In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.”

— Orson Welles

“I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.”

— Orson Welles

“When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.”

— Orson Welles

“A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.”

— Orson Welles

“I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

“Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles