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.
ORSON WELLESEverything 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.
More Orson Welles Quotes
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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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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.
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I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.
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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.
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Personally, I don’t like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she’ll fool her husband, I figure she’ll fool me.
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A man is not from where he is born, but where he chooses to die.
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I’m not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.
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I have an unfortunate personality.
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A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.
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The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
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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.
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What’s happening now is what happened before, and often what’s going to happen again sometime or other.
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Working is part of life, I don’t know how to distinguish between the two. Work is an expression of life.
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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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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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Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.
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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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At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.
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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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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.
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Don’t give them what you think they want. Give them what they never thought was possible.
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Create your own visual style. Let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.
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Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.
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The Godfather’ was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
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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 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