Quotes from Orson Welles

I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.

I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.

The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.

Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

I love moving around from town to town. I never got on a train in my life without my spirits rising.

The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!''

I have no great message to the world.

I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.

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

A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.

Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.

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

Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.

I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right!

One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.

I have an unfortunate personality.

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

The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.

The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.

A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.