Orson Welles Quotes

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

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

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

Just remember, a pig doesn’t fly unless you hurl him out of a cannon.

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

I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.

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

Now I’m an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.

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

A movie in a way is like a question, and every time you make a movie, it’s like biting your nails and asking, ‘Do you love me?’

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.

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

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.

I think I made a mistake once… yeah… it was only once.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

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

The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

The idea of directing a film is the invention of critics – the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room.

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

People who can’t lose, lose.

Criminals are never very amusing. It’s because they’re failures. Those who make real money aren’t counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.

In my dreams, I’m always a poet…and never a movie director.

Everything I do has a moral implications.

I do want to be a director, but not because I’m sure about anything.

The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.

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

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.

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

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

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

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else.

I’m not afraid to fail – because failure is a part of success, to fail means you’re trying.

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.

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Censorship is the height of vanity.

Old age is the only disease you don’t look forward to being cured of.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

No masterpiece was ever created by a lazy artist.

I try to find the poetry in the commonplace.

I never expected to spend my life in that useless, tedious, boring, goddamned industry. I’m sorry. I’ve always seen the manufacture of movies as a mechanical process. Every time I have anything to do with movies, I have to do violence to my nature in order to reconcile myself to it.