Quotes from Orson Welles

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

I would rather be on the set than doing anything.

I'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.

If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.

I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.

Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me.

I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.

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.

I look back on my life and it's 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It's no way to live.

I can't work in a sewer. I come from California.

I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.

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

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Film is like a colony and there are very few colonists.

Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.

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.

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.