Orson Welles Quotes

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.

I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.

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

I do not believe in God, but I do believe in capital punishment.

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.

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

I started at the top and worked my way down.

I’m interested in the theater because I’m interested in communication with audiences. Otherwise I would be in concert music.

Don’t give them what they think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.

The enemy of truth is often not the lie, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

A film is a ribbon of dreams.

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

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

Don’t be afraid of failure. This is the way to succeed.

The only real failure is the failure to try.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theater, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.

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

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

The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.

There is no reason to regret that I cannot finish the other films, because I find there is only one life.

It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if what you want to do is make a lot of money.

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

The enemy of progress is the man of yesterday.

I started at the top and have been very slowly working my way down ever since.

I try to give the best of myself, not to the people, but to myself. And then I say to myself, ‘Please be happy, do your best, be funny, be tragic, be eloquent, be whatever!’

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

The longest journey is the journey inwards.

I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it and I’m afraid of people who do.

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

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.

If I ever did complete something of length, I’d probably smuggle it in as a series of stories or episodes.

I’ve spent the lion’s share of my life in Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Paris. I’m never very far from water. I appreciate it, and I appreciate having the opportunity to work and live and play on it.

I hate Christmas. I hate what it’s become, gone crazy with commercialism. Although they’ll give me a lot of money to go on television, which, you know, I don’t really like at all.

Television is chalk. It’s cheese.

I don’t know my lines, but I know where to look.

Who I am as a person is unfixed, unstable.

Fifteen thousand spectators participated in a unique and daring ‘flash mob’ at Hadrian’s quadriporticus in Rome in the summer of 1950. Suddenly, as a group of Egyptian refugees, they began to dance the ‘Danubio Blu,’ a popular waltz at that time.

The stage is such a dangerous place; everyone desires to be acknowledged.

Cinematic theatre is an oxymoron.

Everything’s very simple in Russia – they’re all mad, nothing works, but the situation is perfectly clear.

I like power. And we must not be destroyed by power.

A story is life by reduction.

Pop art has aspirinized the picture.

Cinema is just a little part of my life, but it is there. The real life and what’s left behind is far more important.

I hate Shakespeare, I hate hearing about him. He was plagiarized! The fairy tales of William Shakespeare! You think you’re seeing a real chestnut… but he swiped those stories, flat out!

Citizen Kane is almost inevitable for anyone who forces his way through adolescence.

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for a moment that we’re not alone.