A biography for Orson Welleshasn’t been written yet.
“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
“A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.”
“In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.”
“Did you ever stop to think why cops are always famous for being dumb? Simple. Because they don't have to be anything else.”
“I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.”
“The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.”
“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.”
“People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.”
“I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.”
“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.”
“My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.”
“The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.”
“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.”
“If you want a happy ending, it just depends on where you close the book!”
“I never said I was a genius.”
“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.”
“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.”