Orson Welles Quotes

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

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

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 prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out

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

n 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.

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

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

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

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

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

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

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

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.

The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.

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.

My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?

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

Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore.

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.

The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.