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Quotes of the Day for 6 May 2005 - Orson Welles

George Orson Welles was born at Kenosha, Wisconsin on this day in 1915. The family soon moved to Chicago. Soon after his mother's death in 1924 he went to the Todd School where he was given access to the school theater and printing press, he was writing, directing, acting in, and promoting theater before he was a teenager. With John Houseman he organized a Works Progress Administration theater company, the two then started Mercury Theatre and created such projects as the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds and the movie Citizen Kane. Welles didn't have great financial success with his later projects, and spent much of the rest of his working life acting for others (including his brilliant Rochester in the 1944 release of Jane Eyre) to earn the money he needed to stage his own productions.

When you are down and out something always turns up - and it is usually the noses of your friends.

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.

There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed; they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act.

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
     - All from Orson Welles, 1915 - 1985

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