Orson Welles: Quotes about people

Orson Welles was American actor, director, writer and producer. Explore interesting quotes on people.

Orson Welles: 106 quotes47 likes

“I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts. To quote from my script for The Dreamers, never expect justice in the world. That is not part of God's plan. Everybody thinks that if they don't get it, they're some kind of odd man out. And it's not true. Nobody gets justice — people get good luck or bad luck.”

Quoted by Barbara Leaming, "Orson Welles: The Unfulfilled Promise". The New York Times, July 14, 1985.

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

“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.”

“The people who’ve done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] — who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don’t succeed — people who’ve had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever — are the people who didn’t want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn’t want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success.”

Quoted in The Orson Welles Story.

“Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great — I'm taking myself as a character — for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian.”

Quoted by Chan Norris, "Orson Welles on Latin America". PM, September 13, 1942, page 17.

“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.”

The Findus Foods "Frozen Peas" Session Out-Takes