Orson Welles Quotes

“There are three intolerable things in life - cold coffee, lukewarm champagne, and overexcited women...”
― Orson Welles

“Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.”
― Orson Welles

“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.”
― Orson Welles

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it was not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Wells in the doorway in the Third Man.”
― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“...she found it made things easier if she dramatised them. Or melodramatised them. It was easier, for example, to face the fact of Uncle Philip if she saw him as a character in a film, possibly played by Orson Welles.”
― Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

“In the desert you always need water,' [Selethen] told [Horace]. 'A wise traveller never goes past a chance to refill his water skins.'
'Is there nowhere else they could do this?' Halt asked. Selethen tapped another mark into the sand with his dagger.
'There are the Orr-San Wells, he said. 'They're smaller and not as reliable.”
― John Flanagan, Erak's Ransom

“It’s only in your twenties and in your seventies and eighties that you do the greatest work. The enemy of society is the middle class, and the enemy of life is middle age.”
― Orson Welles

“To crudely paraphrase a far more elegant apology than ours: Piece out our imperfections with your mind; think - when we speak of whale-boats, whales and oceans, that you see them - for 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our stage; jumping o'er time; turning the accomplishments of many years into an hour-glass...”
― Orson Welles, Moby Dick - Rehearsed

“The Ballad of Harry Lime by Stewart Stafford

Harry found existence overrated,
And its shadow, morality, so outdated,
Scurrying rats down here in the sewer,
Porcine gluttons in punished manure.

Grand aspirations from primordial slime,
Lifting up the rock from time to time,
Samson, destroying a temple of hypocrisy,
And every pillar - hope, faith and charity,

They'd had him from baptism's font,
Trapped before wording his wants,
A heel dipped in brackish liturgy,
Silent collusion in mass duplicity.

For those who remained in smoky rubble?
Rudely awakened from a cocoon bubble:
An obelisk erected to grotesque finance,
Charon’s fee for a Stygian dance.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Although I’m what is called a progressive, it isn’t out of dislike for the past. I don’t reject our yesterdays. I wish that parts of our dead past were more alive. If I’m capable of originality, it’s not because I want to knock down idols or be ahead of the times. If there’s anything rigid about me, it’s a distaste for being in vogue. I would much rather be thought old-fashioned than “with it.” But in general, I still belong to the liberal leftist world as it exists in the West. I vote that way and stand with those people. We may disagree on one issue or another, but that is where I belong.”
― Orson Welles