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Actors, Acting
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Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.
-Orson Welles
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America
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The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.
-Orson Welles
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Difficulty
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When you are down and out something always turns up -- and it is usually the noses of your friends.
-Orson Welles
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Education
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They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
-Orson Welles
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Entertainment
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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
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Film / Filmmaking / Movies
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A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
-Orson Welles
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I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
-Orson Welles
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The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.
-Orson Welles
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Genius
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Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!
-Orson Welles
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Hollywood
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Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
-Orson Welles
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Kindness
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My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.
-Orson Welles
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Law
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The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism.
-Orson Welles
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Mankind, Man
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Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
-Orson Welles
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Manners
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I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.
-Orson Welles
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Men
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I think we're a kind of desperation. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers -- because males have got to try and justify their existence.
-Orson Welles
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Passion
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Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid.
-Orson Welles
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Politics
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Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.
-Orson Welles
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Prayer
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I hate it when people pray on the screen. It's not because I hate praying, but whenever I see an actor fold his hands and look up in the spotlight, I'm lost. There's only one other thing in the movies I hate as much, and that's sex. You just can't get in bed or pray to God and convince me on the screen.
-Orson Welles
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Progress
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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. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
-Orson Welles, in The Third Man 1949
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Quotations
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Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.
-Orson Welles
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Solitude
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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
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Television
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I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
-Orson Welles
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Theater
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I would just like to mention Robert Houdin who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing birdcage trick and the theater matinee - may he rot and perish. Good afternoon.
-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
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Women
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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 girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.
-Orson Welles
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Books by and about Orson Welles