I think IMDb is the single best source for information about multiple entertainment industries, including film. Here is a selection of observations by Orson Welles who was indeed, in every possible way, “larger than life” as a director, producer, writer, and actor.

Please click here to learn more about him. Meanwhile….

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Even if the good old days never existed, the fact that we can conceive such a world is, in fact, an affirmation of the human spirit.

[on pop idol Donny Osmond] He has Van Gogh’s ear for music.

I started at the top and worked my way down.

I’m not bitter about Hollywood’s treatment of me, but over its treatment of D.W. Griffith, Josef von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Buster Keaton and a hundred others.

Movie directing is the perfect refuge for the mediocre.

[on Hollywood in the 1980s] We live in a snake pit here… I hate it but I just don’t allow myself to face the fact that I hold it in contempt because it keeps on turning out to be the only place to go.

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

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. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys.

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.

[on Citizen Kane (1941) being colorized] Keep Ted Turner and his goddamned Crayolas away from my movie.

[At RKO Radio Pictures working on “Heart of Darkness”, a film he later abandoned] This is the biggest electric train set any boy ever had!

For thirty years, people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don’t. 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 is 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.

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

I think I’m… I made essentially a mistake staying in movies, because I… but it… it’s the mistake I can’t regret because it’s like saying, “I shouldn’t have stayed married to that woman, but I did because I love her.”

I would have been more successful if I’d left movies immediately. Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written–anything. I’ve wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along… trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box which is an… a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It’s about 2% movie making and 98% hustling. It’s no way to spend a life.

I think it is always a tremendously good formula in any art form to admit the limitations of the form.

I don’t pray because I don’t want to bore God.

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

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

The word “genius” was whispered into my ear, the first thing I ever heard, while I was still mewling in my crib. So it never occurred to me that I wasn’t until middle age.

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

I’m not rich. Never have been. When you see me in a bad movie as an actor (I hope not as a director), it is because a good movie has not been offered to me. I often make bad films in order to live.