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.'

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissanc…

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.

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…

If there are, let's say, 20 astronauts, there may be two women among those 20 astronauts. If there are 20 FBI guys, there's one woman and the rest are men. So …

I think it's impossible to do Tolkien. It's impossible to get the brilliance of what he wrote about -- just the medium, the book, the novel gives you other are…

Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them. 'Brick' was a good script just to read. It was like, 'Oh my God, these words feel so good in my mouth.' A lot of mo…