Quotes from Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story

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

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

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.

Viele Menschen sind gut erzogen, um nicht mit vollem Mund zu sprechen, aber sie haben keine Bedenken, es mit leerem Kopf zu tun.

There are no villains who doesn't have his reasons.

Roosevelt used to say, "You and I are the two best actors in America.

Many would never speak with a full mouth, but do it with an empty head

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

Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I've never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn't have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.

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

I got that good a contract because I really didn't want to make a film.

A man does not belong to the place he was born in, but to the place he chooses to die.

Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.

I knew all about the importance of dressmakers, because I'd spent my childhood with a woman permanently torn between the necessity of possessing beautiful clothes and the difficulty of paying for them.

I don't want any description of me to be accurate. I want it to be flattering.

We come into the world alone, we die alone, we live alone. Love and friendship is the nearest thing that we can find to create the illusion that we are not totally alone

The stories told about him were endless and legion; were they not produced by the fertile brains of those gossip columnists who must daily dish up a ration of jokes, slanders, insinuations, sly digs for the anonymous multitude concerning whom nobody ever bothers to write anything?

Nuestros trabajos en piedra, en pintura, en impreso están a salvo -algunas de ellas por unas pocas décadas, o uno o dos milenios- pero finalmente todo deberá caer en la guerra o desaparecer en la final y universal ceniza.

You highbrows writing on movies are nuts! In order to write about movies you must first make them.

Tener o no un final feliz depende de dónde decidas detener la narración de la historia

All great writers are actors, even merely competent ones are. They have the actor's capacity for getting inside the skins of their leading characters and transfiguring them- whatever they may be, even murderers- with what they can give of themselves. They do that quite as much as actors do.

Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive of such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit. That the imagination of man is capable of creating the myth of a more open, more generous time is not a sign of our folly.