Quotes by Orson Welles

• 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've always found it very sanitary to be broke.
• I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
• They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
• 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.
• Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.
• I started at the top and worked my way down.
• I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
• I have an unfortunate personality.
• 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.
• The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.
• The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
• The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.
• The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.
• 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.
• When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.
• Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.
• Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
• The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.
• Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!
• A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
• Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
• At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.
• Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
• 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.
• Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.
• Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
• A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
• Fake is as old as the Eden tree.
• Gluttony is not a secret vice.
• Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
• Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
• Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.
• Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
• 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.
• Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
• Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
• I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.
• I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
• I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
• I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.
• My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.