Orson Welles

"The director is a kind of idea and taste machine."

"Age is not a particularly interesting subject. There is nothing glorious about getting old."

"I am a writer. I am not a public speaker, a television personality, or a radio personality. I am a writer."

"The privilege of power is not to have to explain yourself."

"We're all fools and all beautiful in our own ways."

"I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be against an age, not for it."

"Art is the life of a man; life is not the life of an art."

"You know what the fellow said—in Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance."

"The truth is that I belong to a generation that learned to read with the cinema."

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

"I think we're a planet of people, and we are capable of anything."

"The more successful the villain, the more successful the picture."

"I'm not afraid of heights, I'm afraid of widths."

"Actors are one of the last refuges of the old ways of behavior and dress."

"I always try to start out with some authentic material and then turn it into something."

"Ask anybody what they're doing, why they're doing it, but I always say keep it a secret—not because I'm brainwashing them, but it's a good way to keep your imagination open."

"We're really all of us simply a passing fancy of one another."

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

"Memory is the greatest artist."

"A person is smart. People are dumb."

"You make a film the way you do a painting—you start with one color and you add another."

"Congratulations is just an old-fashioned word for encouragement."

"I prefer people to be their own biggest critics."

"The only way to reconcile time and change is to cherish each moment."

"My kind of director creates a world in which every person belongs to some family."

"Creating the future is our responsibility."

"The saddest thing about any man is that he is absolutely alone."

"In the event of a conflict between you and conscience, I would advise that you obey your conscience."

"It's good to design what you want to design and what you believe in."

"Cynicism is the spiritual equivalent of suicide."