Quotes By Orson Welles

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

Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!

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.

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

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.

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

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

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.

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

They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.

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

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

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.

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

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

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

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.