One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.
— Orson Welles
There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present.
I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.
I can think of nothing that an audience won't understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.
I'm one of those fellows so frightened of driving that I go 80 miles an hour - and the more frightened I get, the faster I go.
Look at the real prodigies, and I look like nothing compared to them.
There were centuries when civilization had no theater.
I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays.
The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.
I worry a lot about taking care of my dependents, all those perfectly ordinary middle-class preoccupations.
On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!'
I never said I was a genius.
The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.
In common with all Protestant or Jewish cultures, America was developed on the idea that your word is your bond. Otherwise, the frontier could never have been opened, 'cause it was lawless. A man's word had to mean something.
If I ever own a restaurant, I will never allow the waiters to ask if the diners like their dishes. Particularly when they're talking.
If I don't like somebody's looks, I don't like them.
The first thing one must remember about film is that it is a young medium. And it is essential for every responsible artist to cultivate the ground that has been left fallow.
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.
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.
Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.
I would rather be on the set than doing anything.
My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful.
The two things you cannot do effectively on stage are pray and copulate.
I have no great message to the world.
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.
I'm a provincial. I live very much like a hermit: reading, listening to music, working in the cutting room, writing, commercial work - which doesn't take up that much time.
Everything bad that has ever happened to me has been caused by agents or lawyers.
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.
'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.
As a producer, sitting on the other side of the desk, I have never once had an agent go out on a limb for his client and fight for him. I've never heard one say, 'No, just a minute! This is the actor you should use.' They will always say, 'You don't like him? I've got somebody else.' They're totally spineless.
Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant.
See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I'm profoundly convinced that that's a total lie. I think people are different. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. Bosnians have short necks.
Film is like a colony and there are very few colonists.
I don't want to forgive myself. That's why I hate psychoanalysis I think if you're guilty of something you should live with it. Get rid of it - how can you get rid of a real guilt? I think people should live with it, face up to it.
Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.
I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment.
I am essentially a hack, a commercial person. If I had a hobby, I would immediately make money on it or abandon it.
I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom.
People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.
My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.
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've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible.
I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.
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 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.'
When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
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.
I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.
If you've noticed that I don't use long takes, it's not because I don't like them, but because no one gives me the necessary means to treat myself to them. It's more economical to make one image, then this image and then that image, and try to control them later, in the editing studio.
