Orson Welles Quotes - Page 7

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.

If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them.

In attempting to explain F For Fake's state-side failure, it has occurred to me that perhaps the subject matter was at least partially to blame, and that this country is so blissfully enslaved by the notion of the special sanctity of the expert that an overtly anti-expert film was bound to go too much against the national grain.

Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.

There were centuries when civilization had no theater.

I drag my myth around with me.

In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.

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

I don't take art as seriously as politics.

I don't think any word can explain a man's life.

We made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money.

I'm a lurid character!

If I want to pursue the art of painting - or music or writing or sculpture - it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!

I never said I was a genius.

[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.

Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.

The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.

In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time - in the cinema, only one.

I have no great message to the world.

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

I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.