Orson Welles Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch.”

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

“As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I've never heard one say, 'No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.' They will always say, 'You don't like him? I've got somebody else.' They're totally spineless.”

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

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

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?”

“My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.”