Orson Welles
Orson Welles
George Orson Welleswas an American actor, director, writer, and producer who worked in theatre, radio, and film. He is remembered for his innovative work in all three: in theatre, most notably Caesar, a Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar; in radio, the 1938 broadcast "The War of the Worlds", one of the most famous in the history of radio; and in film, Citizen Kane, consistently ranked as one of the all-time greatest films...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 May 1915
CityKenosha, WI
CountryUnited States of America
When television came along, I'd already done more than 10 years of radio work and I thought everyone would want me. I sat around waiting for the phone to ring - and it didn't.
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.
I was spoiled in a very strange way as a child, because everybody told me, from the moment I was able to hear, that I was absolutely marvelous, and I never heard a discouraging word for years, you see. I didn't know what was ahead of me.
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 director is the most overrated artist in the world. He is the only artist who, with no talent whatsoever, can be a success for 50 years without his lack of talent ever being discovered.
I seem to have no dress sense at all. I'm always being listed in New York among one of the ten worst dressed men of the year. Someone once described me as "looking like an unmade bed." He was right!
I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.
A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.
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.
I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.
Now I'm an old Christmas tree, the roots of which have died. They just come along and while the little needles fall off me replace them with medallions.
In my real movie-going days, which were the thirties, you didn't stand in line. You strolled down the street and sallied into the theater at any hour of the day or night.