Orson Welles Quotes

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.

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.

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

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.

Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?

I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.

. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.

I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.

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.

n Italy for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.