"The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
Orson Welles quotes (page 7 of 10)
199 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre."
Read quote
6 likes
"I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it."
Read quote
6 likes
"Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations."
Read quote
6 likes
"Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!"
Read quote
6 likes
"If everyone worked with wide-angle lenses, I'd shoot all my films in 75mm, because I believe very strongly in the possibilities of the 75mm."
Read quote
6 likes
"I drag my myth around with me."
Read quote
6 likes
"I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world."
Read quote
6 likes
"An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be."
Read quote
5 likes
"In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something."
Read quote
5 likes
"You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful."
Read quote
5 likes
"Even if I'd stayed [in the US to finish 'The Magnificent Ambersons'] I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort."
Read quote
5 likes
"I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."
Read quote
5 likes
"We will sell no wine before its time."
Read quote
5 likes
"There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present."
Read quote
5 likes
"I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them."
Read quote
5 likes
"There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze."
Read quote
5 likes
"Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone."
Read quote
4 likes
"Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great - I'm taking myself as a character - for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian."
Read quote
4 likes
"FDR used to say, 'You and I are the two best actors in America'."
Read quote
4 likes