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 WELLESA writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.
More Orson Welles Quotes
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I don’t say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
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If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
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The most personal thing I’ve put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It’s better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power.
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The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
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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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I started at the top and worked my way down.
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A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.
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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.
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The trouble with a movie is that it’s old before it’s released. It’s no accident that it comes in a can.
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My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
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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.
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Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.
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A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.
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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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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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The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
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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.
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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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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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A movie in production is the greatest train set a boy could ever have.
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I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.
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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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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.
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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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Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.
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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.
ORSON WELLES