"When you are down and out something always turns up -- and it is usually the noses of your friends."

Welles, Orson on Difficulties
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"Ecstasy is not really part of the scene we can do on celluloid."

Welles, Orson on Ecstasy
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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."

Welles, Orson on Entertainment
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"Everybody denies I am a genius --but nobody ever called me one!"

Welles, Orson on Genius
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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."

Welles, Orson on America
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"Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation."

Welles, Orson on Hollywood
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"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people."

Welles, Orson on Insensitivity
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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."

Welles, Orson on Isolation
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"The laws and the stage, both are a form of exhibitionism."

Welles, Orson on Law and Lawyers
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"In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!"

Welles, Orson on Achievement
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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."

Welles, Orson on Men
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"A film is never really any good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."

Welles, Orson on Movies
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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."

Welles, Orson on Politicians and Politics
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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."

Welles, Orson on Prayer
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"Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations."

Welles, Orson on Quotations
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"Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him."

Welles, Orson on Acting and Actors
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"I don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could."

Welles, Orson on Behavior
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"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."

Welles, Orson on Television
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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."

Welles, Orson on Theater
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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."

Welles, Orson on Women
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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."

Welles, Orson on Cinema
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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."

Welles, Orson on Cinema
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"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies."

Welles, Orson on Colleges and Universities
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