Quotes from Orson Welles

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

I much prefer people who rock the boat to people who jump out.

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

Every man who is any kind of artist has a great deal of female in him. I act and give of myself as a man, but I register and receive with the soul of a woman. The only really good artists are feminine. I can't admit the existence of an artist whose dominant personality is masculine.

I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them;once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.

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.

Working is part of life, I don't know how to distinguish between the two... Work is an expression of life.

Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.

The word genius was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.

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

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

I don't take art as seriously as politics.

Why spend 18 hours watching someone else's war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.

A movie studio is the best toy a boy ever had.

The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't.

Each multiplex has screens allocated to each studio. The screens need filling. Studios have to create product to fill their screen, and the amount of good product is limited.

At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

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

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

I haven't seen you in a while, yet I often imagine all your expressions. I haven't spoken to you recently, but many times I hear your thoughts. Good friends must not always be together. It is the feeling of oneness, when distant that proves a lasting