All Quotes

"This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character, to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be; The Mercury Theatre's own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying "Boo!" Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn't mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember please for the next day or so the terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian, it's Halloween."

"A story doesn't have to appeal to the heart; it can also appeal to the spine. Sometimes you want your heart to be warmed, and sometimes you want your spine to tingle."

"Take myself as a good-will ambassador. I'm great — I'm taking myself as a character — for the intellectuals and the man on the street. I'm great where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. leaves off. I'm not so good with high society, in either North or South America, because I'm highly unconventional. Perhaps I bewilder people by being at once the esthete, the intellectual and the vulgarian."

"Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature."

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!"

"An audience is not so much a complement to an actor's ego, as a challenge to his capacities."

"As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect."

"I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment."

"I don't take art as seriously as politics."

"I suppose you are a fool to do it [express a political view as an artist], but if you happen to be more interested in the political question, than the size of your audience, then it doesn't matter."

"I don't regard my career as something so precious that it comes before my convictions."

"Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation — if you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surf board."

"Ignorance, there is no authority in the world like it."

"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."

"Even if I'd stayed in the US to finish The Magnificent Ambersons I would've had to make compromises on the editing, but these would've been mine and not the fruit of confused and often semi-hysterical committees. If I had been there myself I would have found my own solutions and saved the pictures in a form which would have carried the stamp of my own effort."

"A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens."

"I think I made essentially a mistake in staying in movies 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. I would have been more successful if I hadn't been married to her, you know. I would have been more successful if I'd left movies immediately, stayed in the theatre, gone into politics, written, anything. I've wasted a greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along, trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paintbox which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about two percent movie-making and ninety-eight percent hustling. It's no way to spend a life."

"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."

"The people who’ve done well within the [Hollywood] system are the people whose instincts, whose desires [are in natural alignement with those of the producers] — who want to make the kind of movies that producers want to produce. People who don’t succeed — people who’ve had long, bad times; like [Jean] Renoir, for example, who I think was the best director, ever — are the people who didn’t want to make the kind of pictures that producers want to make. Producers didn’t want to make a Renoir picture, even if it was a success."

"One should make movies innocently — the way Adam and Eve named the animals, their first day in the garden. ... Learn from your own interior vision of things, as if there had never been a D.W. Griffith, or a Eisenstein, or a [John] Ford, or a [Jean] Renoir, or anybody."

"I try to be a Christian. I don’t pray, really, because I don’t want to bore God."

"I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. [...] I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts. To quote from my script for The Dreamers, never expect justice in the world. That is not part of God's plan. Everybody thinks that if they don't get it, they're some kind of odd man out. And it's not true. Nobody gets justice — people get good luck or bad luck."

"Don't let Ted Turner deface my movie with his crayons"

"That doesn't make any sense. Sorry. There's no known way of saying an English sentence in which you begin a sentence with "in" and emphasize it. Get me a jury and show me how you can say "In July" and I'll go down on you. That's just idiotic, if you'll forgive me for saying so. It's just stupid... "In July"; I'd love to know how you emphasize "In" in "In July". Impossible! Meaningless!"

"You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. "Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp" Ooh, "crumb-crisp coating." Ahh, that's tough, "crumb-crisp coating." I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written."

""We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes..." [pauses, and continues with a note of disgust in his voice] This is a lot of shit, you know that! You want one more? One more on the beef?"

"But you can't emphasize "beef", that's like his wanting me to emphasize "in" before "July"! Come on, fellows, you're losing your heads! I wouldn't direct any living actor like this in Shakespeare! The way you do this, it's impossible!"

"The right reading for this is the one I'm giving."

"I spend... twenty times more for you people than any other commercial I've ever made. You are such pests! Now what is it you want? In your... depths of your ignorance, what is it you want? Whatever it is you want, I can't deliver, 'cause I just don't see it."

"It isn't worth it. No money is worth this... [walks out]."

"Men created civilization only to impress their girl friends"

"Orson Welles? What are they?"

"Orson Welles is a giant with the face of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog who has broken loose and gone to sleep in the flower bed. An active loafer, a wise madman, a solitary surrounded by humanity, a student who sleeps during the lesson. A strategy: pretending to be drunk to be simply left alone. Seemingly better than anyone else, he can use a nonchalant attitude of real strength, apparently drifting but guided by a half-opened eye. This attitude of an abandoned hulk, and that of a sleepy bear, protects him from the cold fever of the motion picture world. An attitude which made him move on, made him leave Hollywood, and carried him to other lands and other horizons."

"Orson Welles is a poet through his violence and through his grace. Never does he tumble from the tightrope on which he crosses cities and their dramas. [...] His handshake is as firm as he is and I think of it each time my work obliges me to leap over an obstacle."

""He came into bloom too early." "He never could top it." Top what?! His first production on the stage in New York was a black Macbeth in Harlem that set the early evening traffic of Manhattan moving one way — north — for as long as the Federal Theatre Project chose to run the play. He topped this with probably the most stylish French farce ever seen west of the Champs Élysées, and the topping for this was a production of Dr. Faustus that led to the opening of his own theatre, the Mercury, with a production of Julius Caesar so vigorous, so contemporary that it set Broadway on its ear. But luckily, only one ear, for with the other it was listening and running scared with the rest of the country while O. Welles, in a Madison Avenue radio studio, was reading his adaptation of H. G. Wells's account of the Martian invasion of Earth."

"Orson revealed his surprising capacity for collaboration. For all the mass of his own ego, he was able to apprehend other people’s weakness and strength and to make creative use of them: he had a shrewd instinctive sense of when to bully or charm, when to be kind or savage…’"

"Those of us who were close to Orson had long been aware of the obsessive part his father used to play in his life. Much of what he had accomplished so precociously had been done out of a furious need to prove himself in the eys of a man who was no longer there to see it. Now that success had come, in quantities and of a kind that his father had never dreamed of, this conflict, far from being assuaged, seemed to grow more intense and consuming."

"Like Barrymore and Laughton and Brando, he seemed to be developing an obsession with false noses, false faces. He had once, at least, played a role in his own face, Harry Lime in The Third Man, a role he had written for himself; [B]y the sixties he was encased in make-up and his own fat, like an huge operatic version of W.C. Fields."

"I never would have amounted to anything in the theatre if it hadn't been for Orson Welles. The way I looked at acting, it was interesting and it was certainly better than going hungry. But I didn't have a serious approach to it until … I bumped into Orson Welles. He was putting on a Federal Theatre production of Macbeth with Negro players and, somehow, I won the part of Banquo. He rehearsed us for six solid months, but when the play finally went on before an audience, it was right — and it was a wonderful sensation, knowing it was right. Suddenly, the theatre became important to me. I had a respect for it, for what it could say. I had the ambition — I caught it from Orson Welles — to work like mad and be a convincing actor. Later, when Native Son came up, he was the stage director. He was the one who gave me the part, and the one who rehearsed me in it for five weeks. If I'm an actor today, it's because of what he did for me, and I'd sort of like people to know it."

"Orson Welles was far on the way to a theater that would relish poetry and give it the excitement and physical life it is ready to give. His Caesar and Faustus were landmarks of a generation. We need to go on from this lost theater; it remembered many things while it was doing many things."

"He [Welles] was an onlooker at the clumsy, poignant suicide of "The Man on the Ledge," which took place in New York in 1938, when a boy perched for fourteen hours on a window-sill of the Gotham Hotel before plunging into the street. "I stood in the crowd outside for a long time," Welles says pensively, "and wanted to make a film of it all. But they tell me that in the Hollywood version of the film they gave the boy a reason for what he did. That's crazy. It's the crowd that needs explaining.""

"There, but for the grace of God, goes God."

""Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential." from http://web.archive.org/20030225083736/www.ucla.edu/spotlight/archive/html_2001_2002/fac0502_mcclalry.html"

"Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."

"Tonality itself - with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax - is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire."

"The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devastating."

"If I tend to reread the European past in my own Postmodern image, if I frequently write about Bach and Beethoven in the same ways in which I discuss the Artist Formerly Known as Prince and John Zorn, it is not to denigrate the canon but rather to show the power of music all throughout its history as a signifying practice. For this is how culture always works—always grounded in codes and social contracts, always open to fusions, extensions, transformations. To me, music never seems so trivial as in its 'purely musical' readings. If there was at one time a rationale for adopting such an intellectual position, that time has long since past. And if the belief in the nineteenth-century notion of aesthetic autonomy continues to be an issue when we study cultural history, it can no longer be privileged as somehow true."

"Accept no substitutes; I bring truth to the youth."

"Tired of being trapped in this vicious cycle If one more cop harasses me I just might go psycho And when I get ‘em, I’ll hit ’em with the bum rush Only a lunatic would like to see his skull crushed Yo, if you’re smart you’ll really let me go, G But keep me cooped up in this ghetto and catch the Uzi They got me trapped."

"The main thing for us to remember is that, the same crime element that white people are scared of, black people are scared of. The same crime element that white people fear, black people fear. So we defend our self from the same crime element that they are scared of, you know what I'm saying, while they are waiting for legislations to pass and everything, we're next door to the killer, we're next door to him you know. Because we up in the projects where it's 80 niggas in the building. All them killers that they letting out, they're right there in that building. Just because we're black we get along with the killers or something? We get along with rapist's because we're black and from the same hood? What is that? We need protection too."