- Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit.
- [on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh's ear for music.
- I'm not very fond of movies. I don't go to them much.
- I started at the top and worked down.
- I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but over its treatment of D.W. Griffith, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton and a hundred others.
- Movie directing is the perfect refuge for the mediocre.
- [on Hollywood in the 1980s] We live in a snake pit here... I hate it but I just don't allow myself to face the fact that I hold it in contempt because it keeps on turning out to be the only place to go.
- I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
- 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 girlfriends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.
- 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.
- [on Citizen Kane (1941) being colorized] Keep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie.
- [At RKO Radio Pictures working on "Heart of Darkness", a film he later abandoned] This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!
- For thirty years, people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. 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 is 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.
- My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
- I think I'm... I made essentially a mistake staying in movies, because I... but it... it's the 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." I would have been more successful if I'd left movies immediately. Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written--anything. I've wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along... trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box which is an... a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It's about 2% movie making and 98% hustling. It's no way to spend a life.
- I think it is always a tremendously good formula in any art form to admit the limitations of the form.
- I don't pray because I don't want to bore God.
- A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
- I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theater, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai.
- The word "genius" was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn't until middle age.
- I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
- I'm not rich. Never have been. When you see me in a bad movie as an actor (I hope not as a director), it is because a good movie has not been offered to me. I often make bad films in order to live.
- Everybody denies that I am genius - but nobody ever called me one.
- A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.
- Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.
- I do not suppose I shall be remembered for anything. But I don't think about my work in those terms. It is just as vulgar to work for the sake of posterity as to work for the sake of money.
- Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
- Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
- 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.
- If spiritually you're part of the cat family, you can't bear to be laughed at. You have to pretend when you fall down that you really wanted to be down there to see what's under the sofa. The rest of us don't at all mind being laughed at.
- [on his favorite directors] I prefer the old masters; by which I mean: John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.
- [on James Cagney] No one was more unreal and stylized, yet there is no moment when he was not true.
- [on René Clair] A real master: he invented his own Paris, which is better than recording it.
- [on Federico Fellini] His films are a small-town boy's dream of a big city. His sophistication works because it is the creation of someone who doesn't have it. But he shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say.
- [on Edward G. Robinson] An immensely effective actor.
- The optimists are incapable of understanding what it means to adore the impossible.
- [on Stanley Kubrick] Among the young generation, Kubrick strikes me as a giant.
- [to Dick Cavett] I'm always sorry to hear that anybody I admire has been an actor... When did you go straight?
- I don't think history can possibly be true. Possibly! I'll tell you why. We all know people who get things written about, and we know that they're lies written. I told a story to Buck Henry, last year in Weymouth, and he told the story that he thought I told him to a newspaper that I read the other day, and it bears not the *slightest* resemblance to what I said! Now, that's an intelligent man, a year later, meaning me well, and that's the gospel according to Buck Henry, and it's totally apocryphal. Imagine what nonsense everything else is!
- [on Nostradamus' ability to predict the future] One might as well make predictions based on random passages from the phone book.
- [on Jean-Luc Godard] His gifts as a director are enormous. I just can't take him very seriously as a thinker - and that's where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin.
- The only good artists are feminine. I don't believe an artist exists whose dominant characteristic is not feminine. It's nothing to do with homosexuality, but intellectually an artist must be a man with feminine aptitudes.
- I know that in theory the word is secondary in cinema, but the secret of my work is that everything is based on the word. I always begin with the dialogue. And I do not understand how one dares to write action before dialogue. I must begin with what the characters say. I must know what they say before seeing them do what they do.
- A poet needs a pen, a painter a brush, and a director an army.
- I liked the cinema better before I began to do it. Now I can't stop myself from hearing the clappers at the beginning of each shot. All the magic is destroyed.
- I think it's very harmful to see movies for movie makers because you either imitate them or worry about not imitating them and you should do movies innocently and i lost my innocence. Every time i see a picture i lose something i don't gain. I never understand what directors mean when they compliment me and say they've learned from my pictures because i don't believe in learning from other people's pictures. You should learn from your own interior vision and discover innocently as though there had never been D.W. Griffith or [Sergei Eisenstein] or [John Ford] or [Jean Renoir] or anybody.
- [on a lunch encounter with Richard Burton] Richard Burton had great talent. He's ruined his great gifts. He's become a joke with a celebrity wife. Now he just works for money, does the worst shit. And I wasn't rude. To quote Carl Laemmle, "I gave him an evasive answer. I told him, 'Go fuck yourself'.".
- I never could stand looking at Bette Davis, so I don't want to see her act, you see. I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man. [Henry Jaglom], I've never understood why. Have you met him? Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the [Charles Chaplin] disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge... Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he's not. He's scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It's people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me, it's the most embarrassing thing in the world-a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.
- After [Irving Thalberg] died, Norma Shearer--one of the most minimally talented ladies ever to appear on the silver screen and who looked like nothing, with one eye crossed over the other--went right on being the queen of Hollywood. Everybody used to say, "Mrs. Thalberg is coming", "Miss Shearer is arriving", as though they were talking about Sarah Bernhardt.
- In his time, Samuel Goldwyn was considered a classy producer because he never deliberately did anything that wasn't his idea of the best-quality goods. I respected him for that. He was an honest merchant. He may have made a bad picture, but he didn't know it was a bad picture. And he was funny. He actually once said to me, in that high voice of his, "Orson, for you I'd write a blanket check." He said, "With Warner Brothers, a verbal commitment isn't worth the paper it's written on.".
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