“The best stories are about ‘One plus one equals three’.” “We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case and we’re going to live forever. Being a human is actually arriving at the understanding that that’s not…

  I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to…

We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams;— World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever,…

Q : A critic who admires your work very much said that, in The Trial, you were repeating yourself… Welles : Exactly, I repeated myself. I believe we do it all the time. We always take up certain elements again. How can it be…

“What you learn from that first [film] – and I don’t call it ‘trial by fire’; I call it ‘baptism by fire’ – is that you are going to have to take all of the responsibility, because basically when it gets right…

I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who, for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a…