black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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.

Orson Welles

Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.
ORSON WELLES

Country Food Yourself
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.
ORSON WELLES

Bad Game Goodness Hollywood Right True Yourself
An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.
ORSON WELLES

Artist Himself Time
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.
ORSON WELLES

Audience Myself Thinking Understand World
If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they’re talking.
ORSON WELLES

Food Myself Restaurant Talk Wait
The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
ORSON WELLES

Hollywood Invention
Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
ORSON WELLES

Bad Exception Live Luxury Stand Yourself
Ignorance sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. It’s only when you know something about a profession that you are timid or careful.
ORSON WELLES

Care Confidence Equality Ignorance Professional Yourself
A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.
ORSON WELLES

Bad Darkness Day Encouragement Need Ourselves Word
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.
ORSON WELLES

Expression Ideal Perfection Reality
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.
ORSON WELLES

Life Live Money Myself Run Try
The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
ORSON WELLES

Absence Art Enemy Limitation
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.
ORSON WELLES

Act Audience Meaning Myself Work
A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.
ORSON WELLES

Accident Director Job Series
The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.
ORSON WELLES

Camera Record World
I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.
ORSON WELLES

Hate Learning Myself Woman

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Orson Welles Quotes