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orson welles Quotes

Orson Welles Quotes

Birth Date: 1915-05-06 (Thursday, May 6th, 1915)
Date of Death: 1985-10-10 (Thursday, October 10th, 1985)

 

orson welles life timeline

Street and Smith Publications launches a half-hour radio program featuring the announcer for its "Detective Stories" radio show, The Shadow, with Orson Welles in the title role.Sunday, September 26th, 1937
Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells s The War of the Worlds, causing a nationwide panic in the United States.Sunday, October 30th, 1938

Quotes

    • 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.
    • 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!
    • 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.'
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • I try to be a Christian...I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.
    • This theatre is your theatre. You are responsible for its creation and its progress.
    • It's about two percent movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life.
    • 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!
    • 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.
    • '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?
    • 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!
    • The right reading for this is the one I'm giving.
    • 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.
    • It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]
    • Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
    • Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
    • Gluttony is not a secret vice.
    • I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
    • I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
    • Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
    • My doctor has advised me to give up those intimate little dinners for four. Unless there are three people eating with me.
    • Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
    • Tell Turner to keep his goddamned Crayolas away from my film!
    • The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can.
    • If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
    • She's the most exciting woman in the world!
    • Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
    • Everybody denies that I am genius - but nobody ever called me one.
    • Citizen Kane
    • The Magnificent Ambersons (film)
    • The Lady from Shanghai
    • The Third Man (the Harry Lime section contains Welles's famous ad lib about war)
    • Touch of Evil
    • orson welles

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