Orson Welles

Actor

1915-05-06

Quotes by Orson Welles

• What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

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• The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

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• The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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• Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I've never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn't have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.

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• In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

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• A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

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• You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

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

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• I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.

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• A toast, Jedediah, to love on my terms. Those are the only terms anybody ever knows - his own.

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

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• The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.

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• I don't pray really, because I don't want to bore God.

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• In my opinion, there are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God.

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• What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

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• You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

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• Women are another race. They are always changing, like the moon. You can only win by being the cool center of their being. You have to represent something solid and loving. The anchor. Even if you are not. You can't tell them the truth. You have to lie and play games. I've never in my entire life been with someone with whom I didn't have to play a game. I've never been with anyone with whom I could be exactly who I am.

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• The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

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• The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.

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• 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.

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