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Orson Welles

Orson Welles Books

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“No matter what the Bible says—and I'm not a fundamentalist—I just don't think that men were the first. I don't think that Eve was made out of Adam's rib. I think the first sex, biologically, is the female sex, and there are many creatures in our world who are female and only become male as long as is necessary and then revert to the original and superior condition. I think we're a kind of decoration. We're sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we're doing is trying to brighten up the place. That's why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers—because we have got to try and justify our existence. Look how little we do to keep the race going.”

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Author:Orson Welles
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“The world of Mark Twain seems so very far away from us. Today that half-wild innocent America of his childhood memories is a lost continent, sunk forever under those arid deserts of asphalt, those oceans of poison sludge, those mountains of technological garbage which are the monuments of the human dilemma we like to call progress. It’s nice though to catch a glimpse of things as they used to be... a landscape painted in words to bring us back for a moment, to that early morning of the American day so blithe and free when we were still on speaking terms with Mother Earth.”

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Author:Orson Welles
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“I dislike that kind of man. He has the 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 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.”

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Book:My Lunches with Orson
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“There are laws against peddling dope, there can be laws against peddling race hate. But every man has a right to his own opinion as an American boasts, but race hate is not an opinion, it's a phobia. It isn't a viewpoint, race hate is a disease. In a people's world, the incurable racist has no rights. He must be deprived of influence in a people's government. He must be segregated, as he himself would segregate the colored and semitic peoples. As we now segregate the leprous and the insane.”

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Author:Orson Welles
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“Although I’m what is called a progressive, it isn’t out of dislike for the past. I don’t reject our yesterdays. I wish that parts of our dead past were more alive. If I’m capable of originality, it’s not because I want to knock down idols or be ahead of the times. If there’s anything rigid about me, it’s a distaste for being in vogue. I would much rather be thought old-fashioned than “with it.” But in general, I still belong to the liberal leftist world as it exists in the West. I vote that way and stand with those people. We may disagree on one issue or another, but that is where I belong.”

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“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.”

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Author:Orson Welles
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“You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.”

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Author:Orson Welles
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“My theory is that everything went to hell with Prohibition, because it was a law nobody could obey. So the whole concept of the rule of law was corrupted at that moment. Then came Vietnam, and marijuana, which clearly shouldn't be illegal, but is. If you go to jail for ten years in Texas when you light up a joint, who are you? You're a lawbreaker. It's just like Prohibition was. When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society, you see?”

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Author:Orson Welles
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“. . . you [film critics] always overstress the value of images. You judge films in the first place by their visual impact instead of looking for content. This is a great disservice to the cinema. It is like judging a novel only by the quality of its prose. I was guilty of the same sin when I first started writing for the cinema. . . . Now I feel that only the literary mind can help the movies out of that cul de sac into which they have been driven by mere technicians and artificers.”

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Author:Orson Welles
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