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.

— Orson Welles

Orson Welles Quotes

In the theater there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time – in the cinema, only one.

— Orson Welles

The basic and essential human is the woman.

— Orson Welles

Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

The director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.

— Orson Welles

I’ve always found it very sanitary to be broke.

— Orson Welles

As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it’s the aspect.

— Orson Welles

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.

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.

— Orson Welles

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?

— Orson Welles

There are laws against peddling dope, there can be laws against peddling race hate. But every man has a right to his own opinion as an American boasts, but race hate is not an opinion, it’s a phobia. It isn’t a viewpoint, race hate is a disease. In a people’s world, the incurable racist has no rights. He must be deprived of influence in a people’s government. He must be segregated, as he himself would segregate the colored and semitic peoples. As we now segregate the leprous and the insane.

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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.

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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.

— Orson Welles
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