Orson Welles

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

When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.

A writer needs a pen, an artist needs a brush, but a filmmaker needs an army.

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

Old age is the only disease you dont want to be cured of.

Movie directing is a perfect refuge for the mediocre.

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

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

I know people who have a much better recollection of their childhood than I do. They remember very well when they were a year and a half and two years old. I've only one or two daguerreotypes that come to mind.

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

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

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

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

Fake is as old as the Eden tree.

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.

I think I made essential a mistake in staying in movies, because I - 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'm never certain of a performance - my own or the other actors' - or the script or anything... But to me it seems there's only one place in the world the camera can be, and the decision usually comes immediately.

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

I started at the top and worked my way down.

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

If everyone worked with wide-angle lenses, I'd shoot all my films in 75mm, because I believe very strongly in the possibilities of the 75mm.