Quotes About Orson Welles

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

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.

I love beautiful black-and-white movies - anything Bette Davis, especially 'Now', 'Voyager', 'Casablanca', 'Mildred Pierce'; anything by Orson Welles, Truffaut, or Godard; and 'Paper Moon' by Peter Bogdanovich.

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

Vienna. It means nothing to me but to Orson Welles, it was the setting for one of his finest performances - and a place to get huge plates of cheap rich food. I followed the footsteps of my hero, which are still visible in the concrete, to the world famous Ferris wheel.

she found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by Orson Welles.

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.

I think I subconsciously knew you needed life experience to direct, and the best films are directed by people who have really lived, with exceptions like Orson Welles, who just burst out of the gate. There are prodigies like that, but for me, personally, I thought I needed life experience.

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

Clarence Darrow was a unique and courageous man. Several of my favourite actors have played Darrow... Henry Fonda, Orson Welles and Spencer Tracy.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I mean, everyone says Citizen Kane. It isn't that great, anyway. And Orson Welles I knew well, of course. He made other incredible films that no one would let him make, which were much better than Citizen Kane, really.

Orson Welles used to say that Italy was full of actors—fifty million of them—almost all good. He claimed the few bad ones were on the stage, or the cinema screen.

I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened 'Citizen Kane' for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it.

Orson Welles, el genio malvadísimo de la cara blanda que se burlaba de la paz suiza, de los relojes cucú, que no tenía moral ni escrúpulos para la penicilina.

I grew up on the crime stuff. Spillane, Chandler, Jim Thompson, and noir movies like Fuller, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang. When I first showed up in New York to write comics back in the late 1970s, I came with a bunch of crime stories but everybody just wanted men in tights.

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

Kenneth Tynan: What is your major vice? Orson Welles: Accidia — the medieval Latin word for melancholy, and sloth. I don't give way to it for long, but it still comes lurching at me out of the shadows.

It always amazed me that he was able to do it, and that Orson Welles was able to do it. I never understood it because the talents are absolutely opposite - polar opposites.

When Orson Welles was acting in 'Compulsion,' the director Richard Fleischer let him just take over and direct the courtroom scenes. To be able to see Welles - who knew more about directing than anyone - direct himself and the other actors, it was unbelievable and unforgettable.

Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt, and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man - and I'm in all of them.

Only a certain breed of actor should ever even try to work for Orson Welles. I'm glad I'm one of that breed.

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

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.