Top 160 Orson Welles Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

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

— Orson Welles

53. “I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

55. “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.”

— Orson Welles

56. “By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don’t believe much in accomplishment.”

— Orson Welles

57. “I don’t regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

59. “I’m a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work – which doesn’t take up that much time.”

— Orson Welles

60. “My definition of success is not having things thrown at me!”

— Orson Welles

61. “Why spend 18 hours watching someone else’s war, when you know how it comes out? We win, and then have to buy all their cars.”

— Orson Welles

62. “People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.”

— Orson Welles

63. “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.”

— Orson Welles

64. “Human nature is eternal; therefore one who follows his nature keeps his original nature, in the end.”

— Orson Welles

65. “A director is someone who presides over a series of accidents.”

— Orson Welles

66. “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

67. “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!”

— Orson Welles

68. “As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it’s the aspect.”

— Orson Welles

69. “A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows – his own.”

— Orson Welles

70. “Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy.”

— Orson Welles

71. “When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.”

— Orson Welles

72. “The truth about any man can only be calculated by the sum of everything that has been said about him.”

— Orson Welles

73. “I’m not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.”

— Orson Welles

74. “Almost all serious stories in the world are stories of failure with a death in it. But there is more lost paradise in them than defeat.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

77. “An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

79. “I don’t want to forgive myself. That’s why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you’re guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it – how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.”

— Orson Welles

80. “I think I made essential a mistake in staying in movies, because I – but it’s a 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.’”

— Orson Welles

81. “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.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

84. “We come into the world alone, we die alone, we live alone. Love and friendship is the nearest thing that we can find to create the illusion that we are not totally alone.”

— Orson Welles

85. “I love informality. I hate dressing up. I hate to be conventional – and I hate every kind of snob.”

— Orson Welles

86. “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.”

— Orson Welles

87. “Every true artist must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

89. “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.”

— Orson Welles

90. “I’d make my promises now if I wasn’t so busy arranging to keep them.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

92. “Crooks aren’t the worst people, just the stupidest. The fleas of the world.”

— Orson Welles

93. “I don’t want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don’t think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully – not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

95. “Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can’t tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I’ve never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn’t have to play a game. I’ve never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.”

— Orson Welles

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

— Orson Welles

97. “I never said I was a genius.”

— Orson Welles

98. “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

99. “When television came along, I’d already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring – and it didn’t.”

— Orson Welles

100. “I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.”

— Orson Welles