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

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
— Orson Welles

Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.
— Orson Welles

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.
— Orson Welles

By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment.
— Orson Welles

Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.
— Orson Welles

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

Criticism is the essence of creation.
— Orson Welles

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
— Orson Welles

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

Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.
— Orson Welles

Everybody denies I am a genius — but nobody ever called me one!
— Orson Welles

Everything I do today took me 25 years!
— Orson Welles

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.
— Orson Welles

For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.
— Orson Welles, to Kenneth Tynan (1967)

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.
— Orson Welles

Gluttony is not a secret vice.
— Orson Welles

He is as unaffected as Albert Einstein.
— Orson Welles

Hollywood expects you to experiment but on a film that makes money and if you don't make money, you're to blame. Your job is to make money.
— Orson Welles

Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.
— Orson Welles

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
— Orson Welles

I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I've always wanted to be a magician.
— Orson Welles

I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.
— Orson Welles

I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
— Orson Welles

I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
— Orson Welles

I don't want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don't think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully - not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews.
— Orson Welles, to Kenneth Tynan (1967)

I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.
— Orson Welles

I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.
— Orson Welles

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
— Orson Welles

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.
— 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

I have an unfortunate personality.
— Orson Welles

I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
— Orson Welles

I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional — and I hate every kind of snob.
— Orson Welles

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

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right!
— Orson Welles

I started at the top and worked my way down.
— Orson Welles

I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers — because males have got to try and justify their existence.
— Orson Welles

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.
— Orson Welles

I'd make my promises now if I wasn't so busy arranging to keep them.
— Orson Welles, as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane

If I want to pursue the art of painting — or music or writing or sculpture — it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!
— Orson Welles

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.
— Orson Welles

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

I'm a lurid character!
— Orson Welles

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
— Orson Welles, as Harry Lime in The Third Man

It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations.
— Orson Welles

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

Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle.
— Orson Welles, as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane

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

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.
— Orson Welles

My definition of success is not having things thrown at me!
— Orson Welles

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

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
— 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

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
— Orson Welles

Nowadays, people's interest in motion pictures is restricted to wanting to know whether Veronica Lake's hair is all her own. I don't see how it could be.
— Orson Welles

Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.
— 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

Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.
— Orson Welles

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
— Orson Welles

Rosebud.
— Orson Welles, final word of Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane

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

The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.
— Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
— Orson Welles

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

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

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.
— Orson Welles

The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.
— Orson Welles

[The movies] make the sort of comment only a novel can make, an allusion to the world in which people live, the psychological and economic motivations, the influences of the period in which they lived.
— Orson Welles

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

The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.
— Orson Welles

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

There are three intolerable things in life — cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.
— Orson Welles

They teach you anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
— Orson Welles

Today I believe that man cannot escape his destiny to create whatever it is we make — jazz, a wooden spoon, or graffiti on the wall. All of these are expressions of man's creativity, proof that man has not yet been destroyed by technology. But are we making things for the people of our epoch or repeating what has been done before? And finally, is the question itself important? We must ask ourselves that. The most important thing is always to doubt the importance of the question.
— 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

When you are down and out something always turns up — and it is usually the noses of your friends.
— Orson Welles

You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin.
— Orson Welles, to his biographer, Barbara Leaming

You long-faced, over-dressed anarchist!
— Orson Welles, as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane