Orson Welles

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

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I’m pretty careful to lose most of them.

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

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn’t isolated, something is wrong.

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.

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.

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

They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.

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.

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.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

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.

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don’t have to be anything else.

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

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.

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

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.

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

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

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

I’ve always found it very sanitary to be broke.

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.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that’s printed about him.

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

I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

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

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

I have an unfortunate personality.

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.

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

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.

Criminals are never very amusing. It’s because they’re failures. Those who make real money aren’t counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.

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

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

Gluttony is not a secret vice.