Orson Welles Quotes

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

~ Orson Welles

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.

~ Orson Welles

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

~ Orson Welles

A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

~ Orson Welles

In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

~ Orson Welles

Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I’ve never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn’t have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.

~ Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

~ Orson Welles

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

~ Orson Welles

Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn

~ Orson Welles

You're beautful. Yes you are, you're very very beautiful. Extremely beautiful.

~ Orson Welles

If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book!

~ Orson Welles

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for a moment that we’re not alone.

~ Orson Welles

I dont believe in learning from other peoples pictures. I think you should learn from your own interior vision of things and discover, as I say, Innocently, as though there had never been anybody.

~ Orson Welles

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

~ Orson Welles

I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.

~ Orson Welles

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

~ Orson Welles

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

~ Orson Welles

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

~ Orson Welles

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.

~ Orson Welles

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.

~ Orson Welles

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

~ Orson Welles

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

~ Orson Welles

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

~ Orson Welles

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

~ Orson Welles

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

~ Orson Welles

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

~ Orson Welles

I have an unfortunate personality.

~ Orson Welles

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

~ Orson Welles

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

~ Orson Welles

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.

~ Orson Welles