Orson Welles Quotes - Page 3

Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.

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.

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness.

See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.

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

'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

I have an unfortunate personality.

Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

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.

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.

The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

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

Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.

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.

. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.

I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible.

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

Crooks aren't the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.