Orson Welles Quotes

Orson Welles presents bold, sardonic commentary on art and movies that feel like a daring director's backstage whisper.

61 quotes

1. This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying 'Boo!'. Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the best next thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween.

2. In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

3. He [Welles] was an onlooker at the clumsy, poignant suicide of 'The Man on the Ledge,' which took place in New York in 1938, when a boy perched for fourteen hours on a window-sill of the Gotham Hotel before plunging into the street. 'I stood in the crowd outside for a long time,' Welles says pensively, 'and wanted to make a film of it all. But they tell me that in the Hollywood version of the film they gave the boy a reason for what he did. That's crazy. It's the crowd that needs explaining.'

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. I try to be a Christian...I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.

7. This theatre is your theatre. You are responsible for its creation and its progress.

8. It's about two percent movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.

9. That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with 'in' and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say 'In July' and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me by saying so. That's just stupid... 'In July'; I'd love to know how you emphasize 'In' in 'In July'. Impossible! Meaningless!

10. You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. 'Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp' Ooh, 'crumb-crisp coating.' Ahh, that's tough, 'crumb-crisp coating.' I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written.

11. 'We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes...' (pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice) This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?

12. But you can't emphasize 'beef', that's like his wanting me to emphasize 'in' before 'July'! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!

13. The right reading for this is the one I'm giving.

14. I spend... twenty times more for you people than any other commercial I've ever made. You are such pests! Now what is it you want? In your... depths of your ignorance, what is it you want? Whatever it is you want, I can't deliver, 'cause I just don't see it.

15. It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]

16. Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.

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

18. Gluttony is not a secret vice.

19. I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

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

21. Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

22. My doctor has advised me to give up those intimate little dinners for four. Unless there are three people eating with me.

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

24. Tell Turner to keep his goddamned Crayolas away from my film!

25. The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can.

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

27. She's the most exciting woman in the world!

28. Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

29. Everybody denies that I am genius - but nobody ever called me one.

30. Citizen Kane

31. The Magnificent Ambersons (film)

32. The Lady from Shanghai

33. The Third Man (the Harry Lime section contains Welles's famous ad lib about war)

34. Touch of Evil

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

36. The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

37. There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.

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

39. The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

40. There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women...

41. I'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.

42. I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

43. When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't.

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

45. The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

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

47. In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

48. I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

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

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

51. You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.

52. The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

53. 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.

54. Each multiplex has screens allocated to each studio. The screens need filling. Studios have to create product to fill their screen, and the amount of good product is limited.

55. 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.

56. Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

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

58. I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.

59. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.

60. I must be sincere towards what I am. ... Experimenting is the only thing that fills me with enthusiasm. ... It is the only sphere where I feel really honest and sincere.

61. Husbands should revolt from time to time. Even the best circus-number becomes boring if the beast is too tame.