Orson Welles - biography

1915-1985

Biography

Orson Welles is best-known for the following films:

Orson Welles Quotes

“In Italy for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. ”

“Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that’s printed about him.”

“The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.”

“[On Edward G. Robinson:] An immensely effective actor.”

“[On James Cagney:] No one was more unreal and stylized, yet there is no moment when he was not true.”

“A good artist should be isolated. If he isn’t isolated, something is wrong.”

“I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.”

“I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.”

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

“Criminals are never very amusing. It’s because they’re failures. Those who make real money aren’t counted as criminals. This is a class distinction, not an ethical problem.”

“(On Rene Clair:] A real master: he invented his own Paris, which is better than recording it.”

“I prefer the old masters; by which I mean: John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.”

“[John Huston]’s as fascinating and as variable as his films. A Mephistopheles, an outrageously seductive, unfrocked cardinal, an amiable Count Dracula who drank only the best vintages of burgundy and never bared his teeth except to smile. He lives up to his living legend - and he lives it up.”

“[On Federico Fellini:] His films are a small town boy’s dream of a big city. His sophistication works because it is the creation of someone who doesn’t have it. But he shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say.”

“Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.”

“I made essentially a mistake staying in movies... it’s the mistake I can’t regret because it’s like saying ‘I shouldn’t have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her.’ I would have been more successful if I’d left movies immediately. Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written-- anything. I’ve wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along... trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box wich is an... a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It’s about two percent movie making and 98% hustling. It’s no way to spend a life.”

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

“My own start in movies [Citizen Kane] was a lucky one, thanks to a contract that for almost thirty years remained unique in Hollywood history. That contract shattered all precedents and challenged for a brief moment the basic premise of the whole studio system. Quite simply, I was left alone.”

“The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.”

“This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had! ”

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

“I’m not very fond of movies. I don’t go to them much.”

“It’s a movie about making a movie within which there is a movie and within that movie, the filmmaker makes a movie. [On his unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind]”

“Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.”

“[On Citizen Kane being colorized:] Keep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie.”

“We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

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

“Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!”

“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.”

“Hollywood died on me as soon as I got there.”

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

“I’m not bitter about Hollywood’s treatment of me - but of its treatment of Griffith, von Sternberg, Buster Keaton and a hundred others.”

“We live in a snake pit here...I hate it but I just don’t allow myself to face the fact that I hold it in contempt because it keeps on turning out to be the only place to go.”

“Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.”

“I’m not rich. Never have been. When you see me in a bad movie as an actor (I hope not as a director), it is because a good movie has not been offered to me. I often make bad films in order to live.”

“[On Donny Osmond:] He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.”

“Only very intelligent people don’t wish they were in politics, and I’m dumb enough to want to be in there.”

“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.”

“Power corrupts but lack of power corrupts absolutely.”

“I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.”

“I hate it when people pray on the screen. It’s not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I’m lost. There’s only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that’s sex. You just can’t get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.”

“Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.”

“I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.”

“Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.”

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

“If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.”

“There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women.”

“A lot of vices are secret but not gluttony - it shows. It certainly shows on me.”

“Gluttony is not a secret vice.”

“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.”

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”

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

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

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

“Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit.”

“Fake is as old as the Eden tree.”

“For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don’t. 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 is 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 do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don’t think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.”

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

“I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I’m pretty careful to lose most of them.”

“I have an unfortunate personality.”

“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 started at the top and worked my way down.”

“I think it is always a tremendously good formula in any art form to admit the limitations of the form.”

“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.”

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

“If spiritually you’re part of the cat family, you can’t bear to be laughed at. You have to pretend when you fall down that you really wanted to be down there to see what’s under the sofa. The rest of us don’t at all mind being laughed at.”

“Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up.”

“Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.”

“Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.”

“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.”

“Personally, I don’t like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she’ll fool her husband, I figure she’ll fool me.”

“The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.”

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

“They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.”

Filmography

The Film Director