"They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies."

"Gluttony is not a secret vice."

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

"On my tombstone, I want written: 'He never did 'Love Boat!'"

"I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose."

"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."

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."

"The best thing commercially, which is the worst artistically, by and large, is the most successful."

"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."

"I have no great message to the world."

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

"I have always been more interested in experiment, than in accomplishment."

"I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."

"'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed."

"Fake is as old as the Eden tree."

"One shouldn't ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable."

"My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people."

"Personally, I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband. If she'll fool her husband, I figure she'll fool me."

"I have the terrible feeling that, because I am wearing a white beard and am sitting in the back of the theatre, you expect me to tell you the truth about something. These are the cheap seats, not Mount Sinai."

"My mother and father were both much more remarkable than any story of mine can make them. They seem to me just mythically wonderful."

"Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in senate."

"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."

"The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics - the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room."

"I've spent most of my mature life trying to prove that I'm not irresponsible."

"I have an unfortunate personality."

"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."

"When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society."

"There's no biography so interesting as the one in which the biographer is present."

"Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature."

"Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what's for lunch."

"The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention."

"A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."

"Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck."

"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."

"Create your own visual style... let it be unique for yourself and yet identifiable for others."

"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."

"Never expect justice in this world. That is not part of God's plan. Everybody thinks that if they don't get it, they're some kind of odd man out. And it's not true. Nobody gets justice - people just get good luck or bad luck."

"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."

"N Italy for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

"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."

"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."

"I don't want any description of me to be accurate; I want it to be flattering. I don't think people who have to sing for their supper ever like to be described truthfully - not in print anyway. We need to sell tickets, so we need good reviews."

"Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?"

"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."

"A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours."

"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."

"Six years ago, I looked at a picture of the world's greatest newspaper men. I felt like a kid in front of a candy store. Well, tonight, six years later, I got my candy - all of it. Welcome, gentlemen, to the Inquirer! Make up an extra copy of that picture and send it to the Chronicle"

"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'm extremely surprised to learn that a story, which has become familiar to children through the medium of comic strips and many succeeding novels and adventure stories, should have had such an immediate and profound effect upon radio listeners."

"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."