The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
ORSON WELLESRace hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
More Orson Welles Quotes
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I seem to have no dress sense at all. I’m always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as “looking like an unmade bed.” He was right!
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Hollywood is Hollywood. There’s nothing you can say about it that isn’t true, good or bad. And if you get into it, you have no right to be bitter — you’re the one who sat down, and joined the game.
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I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional – and I hate every kind of snob.
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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.
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Paris is the playwright’s delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor’s city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.
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The cinema has no boundary; it is a ribbon of dream.
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Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
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The director is simply the audience. His job is to preside over accidents.
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When you are down and out something always turns up – and it is usually the noses of your friends.
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In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.
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See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.
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A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
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Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.
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I’m not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.
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I can think of nothing that an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.
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I’m one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour – and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.
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I look back on my life and it’s 95% running around trying to raise money to make movies and 5% actually making them. It’s no way to live.
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There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.
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I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.
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Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.
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Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.
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I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.
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I’ve never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies. Egotism and laziness. And they’re all lit like television shows.
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Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
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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.
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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.
ORSON WELLES