Quotes by Orson Welles

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

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

"If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio."

"My kind of director is an actor-director who writes."

"I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible."

"The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left."

"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."

"The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention."

"Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch."

"The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room."

"I have wasted the greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling It's no way to spend a life."

"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."

"Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate."

"In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

"Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?"

"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."

"Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions."

"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 an artist has always to be out of step with his time."