Orson Welles cytaty

„We Włoszech przez trzydzieści lat rządów Borgiów mieli wojnę, terror, mord i rozlew krwi. Zrodzili Michała Anioła, Leonarda da Vinci i renesans. W Szwajcarii mieli braterską miłość, pięćset lat demokracji i pokoju i co zrodzili? Zegar z kukułką.”

„Film nigdy nie jest naprawdę dobry, dopóki kamera nie jest okiem w głowie poety.”

„Pieniądz jest szóstym zmysłem, który umożliwia uznanie dla pozostałych pięciu.”

„Aktorzy to wielcy łgarze.”

„Wrogiem sztuki jest brak ograniczeń.”

“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.”

“I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.”

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

“There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women…”

“I don't take art as seriously as politics.”

“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.”

“I don't regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.”

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

“I try to be a Christian…I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.”

“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”

“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 girlfriends.”

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

“I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.”

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

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

“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.”

“A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.”

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

“A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.”

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

“I don't think any word can explain a man's life.”

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

“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 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.”

“Men created civilization only to impress their girl friends”

“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 next best 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.”

“It isn't worth it. No money is worth this… [walks out].”

“Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.”

“An audience is not so much a complement to an actor's ego, as a challenge to his capacities.”