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

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

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

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.

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

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

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.

Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.

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

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

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

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.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

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

I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

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

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

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 don't say we all ought to misbehave, but we ought to look as if we could.

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

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.

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?