Top 160 Orson Welles Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn’t know what was ahead of me.”

— Orson Welles

102. “They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.”

— Orson Welles

103. “At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.”

— Orson Welles

104. “I’ve spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I’m not irresponsible.”

— Orson Welles

105. “It would be so much better if the critics would come, not on first nights, but on last nights, when they could exercise their undoubted flair for funeral orations.”

— Orson Welles

106. “Almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.”

— Orson Welles

107. “You could write all the IDEAS of all the movies, my own included, on the head of a pin.”

— Orson Welles

108. “Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.”

— Orson Welles

109. “I’m extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners.”

— Orson Welles

110. “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.”

— Orson Welles

111. “If I want to pursue the art of painting – or music or writing or sculpture – it requires only my time and a few dollars for materials. If, however, I want to produce a motion picture I have to go out and raise a million dollars!”

— Orson Welles

112. “Film is like a colony and there are very few colonists.”

— Orson Welles

113. “The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.”

— Orson Welles

114. “Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.”

— Orson Welles

115. “I drag my myth around with me.”

— Orson Welles

116. “Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.”

— Orson Welles

117. “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.”

— Orson Welles

118. “I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I’m pretty careful to lose most of them.”

— Orson Welles

119. “If everyone worked with wide-angle lenses, I’d shoot all my films in 75mm, because I believe very strongly in the possibilities of the 75mm.”

— Orson Welles

120. “A man does not belong to the place he was born in, but to the place he chooses to die.”

— Orson Welles

121. “Hollywood is a gold-plated suburb suitable for golfers, gardeners, assorted middlemen, and contented movies stars. I am none of these things.”

— Orson Welles

122. “I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.”

— Orson Welles

123. “Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.”

— Orson Welles

124. “I’m not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I’m no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.”

— Orson Welles

125. “We made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.”

— Orson Welles

126. “There are a thousand ways of playing a good classic. If it were effective, I would play Hamlet on a trapeze.”

— Orson Welles

127. “Cinema as a means of expression fascinates me.”

— Orson Welles

128. “I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I’ve only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.”

— Orson Welles

129. “The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.”

— Orson Welles

130. “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.”

— Orson Welles

131. “I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee – may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.”

— Orson Welles

132. “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

133. “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

134. “The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful.”

— Orson Welles

135. “Everybody denies I am a genius – but nobody ever called me one!”

— Orson Welles

136. “Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate.”

— Orson Welles

137. “Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.”

— Orson Welles

138. “I have no great message to the world.”

— Orson Welles

139. “There’s no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.”

— Orson Welles

140. “There were centuries when civilization had no theater.”

— Orson Welles

141. “The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don’t mean a conceit of the producer.”

— Orson Welles

142. “The trouble with a movie is that it’s old before it’s released. It’s no accident that it comes in a can.”

— Orson Welles

143. “There are no villains who doesn’t have his reasons.”

— Orson Welles

144. “Each multiplex has screens allocated to each studio. The screens need filling. Studios have to create product to fill their screen, and the amount of good product is limited.”

— Orson Welles

145. “I can’t work in a sewer. I come from California.”

— Orson Welles

146. “I discovered at the age of six that everything was a phony, worked with mirrors. Since then, I’ve always wanted to be a magician.”

— Orson Welles

147. “I don’t take art as seriously as politics.”

— Orson Welles

148. “Husbands should revolt from time to time. Even the best circus-number becomes boring if the beast is too tame.”

— Orson Welles

149. “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.”

— Orson Welles

150. “I got that good a contract because I really didn’t want to make a film.”

— Orson Welles