Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

English Italiano Polski עברית Français Português فارسی Español 中文 Русский Deutsch العربية हिन्दी 日本語 Ελληνικά Latina

Orson Welles

33 quotes

“A story doesn't have to appeal to the heart; it can also appeal to the spine. Sometimes you want your heart to be warmed, and sometimes you want your spine to tingle.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to Lucille Fletcher's radio play The Hitch-Hiker (Suspense, broadcast September 2, 1942).
“Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great — I'm taking myself as a character — for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Chan Norris, "Orson Welles on Latin America". PM (September 13, 1942), p. 17.
“Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted from a commentary aired on 8/11/1946 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqKEb4h6jec&list=PLfJteNATGDXI7G5xF1K3GtAbB-VkRIpia&index=3
“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lines attributed to Welles as the character Harry Lime in the film The Third Man (1949).
“An audience is not so much a complement to an actor's ego, as a challenge to his capacities.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1955 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Welles, speaking in an episode of Orson Welles Sketch-Book (1955)
“As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1958 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From André Bazin "Interview with Orson Welles", Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 84 (June 1958), as cited in Jean Mitry and Christopher King The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema (1999). Indiana University Press. , p. 176.
“I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't take art as seriously as politics.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose you are a fool to do it [express a political view as an artist], but if you happen to be more interested in the political question, than the size of your audience, then it doesn't matter.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1960 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview with Bernard Braden in Orson Welles: The Paris Interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (1960)
“Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation — if you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surf board.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To actor Keith Baxter (probably in 1964) during production of Chimes at Midnight, from an interview of Baxter by Geoff Andrew at a British Film Institute event (August 3, 2015), as transcribed at Wellesnet
“Ignorance, there is no authority in the world like it.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From The Dick Cavett Show (May 14, 1970)
“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 (1915–1985) first seen 1971 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in an interview from Hollywood Voices, ed. Andrew Sarris (1971).
“Even if I'd stayed in the US to finish The Magnificent Ambersons I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From conversations with Peter Bogdanovich (1969–1972), as cited in This is Orson Welles (1992).
“A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From conversations with Peter Bogdanovich (1969–1972), as cited in This is Orson Welles (1992), p. 201.
“I have only one real enemy in my life that I know about, and that is John Houseman. Everything begins and ends with that hostility behind the mandarin benevolence.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited by Richard Meryman in Mank: The Wit, World, and Life of Herman Mankiewicz. New York: Morrow, 1978, p. 255.
“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From the screenplay for The Big Brass Ring (early 1980s), Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Teresa Press (1987).
“Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From The Orson Welles Story (1982).
“The people who’ve done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] — who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don’t succeed — people who’ve had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever — are the people who didn’t want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn’t want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From The Orson Welles Story (1982).
“One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden. ... Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W. Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From The Orson Welles Story (1982).
“I try to be a Christian. I don’t pray, really, because I don’t want to bore God.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview on The Merv Griffin Show (April 1982), as cited in "In the words or word of Orson Welles", SFGate (May 4, 2015)
“I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. [...] I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts. To quote from my script for The Dreamers, never expect justice in the world. That is not part of God's plan. Everybody thinks that if they don't get it, they're some kind of odd man out. And it's not true. Nobody gets justice — people get good luck or bad luck.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by Barbara Leaming "Orson Welles: The Unfulfilled Promise". The New York Times (July 14, 1985).
“Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with "in" and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say "In July" and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me for saying so. It's just stupid... "In July"; I'd love to know how you emphasize "In" in "In July". Impossible! Meaningless!”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. "Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp" Ooh, "crumb-crisp coating." Ahh, that's tough, "crumb-crisp coating." I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes..." [pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice] This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But you can't emphasize "beef", that's like his wanting me to emphasize "in" before "July"! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The right reading for this is the one I'm giving.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I spend... twenty times more for you people than any other commercial I've ever made. You are such pests! Now what is it you want? In your... depths of your ignorance, what is it you want? Whatever it is you want, I can't deliver, 'cause I just don't see it.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out].”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) said by 1985 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men created civilization only to impress their girl friends”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attributed to Welles in Ebony magazine (August 1977).
“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying "Boo!" Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The on-air statement delivered at the end of The Mercury Theatre on the Air live radio production of The War of the Worlds (October 30, 1938).
“I think I made essentially a mistake in staying in movies but it's a mistake I can't regret because it's like saying I shouldn't have stayed married to that woman but I did because I love her. I would have been more successful if I hadn't been married to her, you know. I would have been more successful if I'd left movies immediately, stayed in the theatre, gone into politics, written, anything. I've wasted a 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 movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.”
Orson Welles (1915–1985) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview with Leslie Megahey for The Orson Welles Story (1982); transcribed in Mark Estrin's Orson Welles: Interviews. Jackson. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2002, p. 209.