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.

Orson Welles

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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.

Orson Welles

When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.

Orson Welles

Everybody denies I am a genius - but nobody ever called me one!

Orson Welles

The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

I've always found it very sanitary to be broke.

Orson Welles

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.

Orson Welles

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

I started at the top and worked my way down.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

Orson Welles

I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

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

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.

Orson Welles

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.

Orson Welles

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

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

I feel I have to protect myself against things. So I'm pretty careful to lose most of them.

Orson Welles

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

Orson Welles

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

Orson Welles

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

Orson Welles

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

Orson Welles

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.

Orson Welles

The essential is to excite the spectators. If that means playing Hamlet on a flying trapeze or in an aquarium, you do it.

Orson Welles

I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Orson Welles

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles

I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.

Orson Welles

Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others.

Orson Welles

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

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

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

Orson Welles

Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.

Orson Welles

I have an unfortunate personality.

Orson Welles

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

Orson Welles