Orson Welles on movies

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

You know what the fellow said: In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love⁠—they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

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

Sundance is weird. The movies are weird. You actually have to think about them when you watch them.

Britney Spearsborn 1981After walking out of a screening of The Singing Detective (2003) at the Sundance Film Festival; quoted in The Washington Post (31 January 2003) and other newspapers

I wrote a novel this year called Shop Girl, and several producers came to me and wanted to turn it into a movie. And I said, “If you think you’re going to take this book and change it around, and Hollywoodize it and change the ending…that’s going to cost you.”

Steve Martinborn 1945

You know what your problem is? It’s that you haven’t seen enough movies⁠—all of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.

Steve Martinborn 1945