Orson Welles Quotes

Of course, we're all a mass of contradictions.

Everybody's got that split between the beautiful and fragile, the hard and the dark.

I think everybody has a good and bad side.

I don't think there are in life, pure darkness or pure light. Everyone's got a little of everything.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

Life is that perfect fine line between ironies.

I'm full of contradictions.

I think the phrase that resonates from 'Just One Year' is something I sort of live by: 'The truth and its opposite are flip sides of the same coin.'

What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness. One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy.

Contradiction was something I really like when it is embraced in that kind of philosophy.

I think I'm a combination of very simple pleasures and the fact I've read a lot of books. I don't think it's a binary opposition across the board in humans and I think I'm an example that it's not. I'm hosting gay marriage rallies and I have tons of guns at home. There's a lot of middle ground in the world and I'm one of those people.

I like characters who are contradictory.

Duality is not a story. Duality is just a complexity.

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.

Everyone on the planet has a dark and a light. That's a multi-dimensional character.

Life is strong and fragile. It's a paradox... It's both things, like quantum physics: It's a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.

I think people have to choose between living with contradictions or painting themselves into a corner. I have a lot of contradictions.

There's a duality in every man and every woman.

Even a sheet of paper has two sides.

I'm definitely interested in exploring human contradictions. Contradictions are what make us human - it's what defines us as human beings. Contradictions are what make characters interesting, and I've been lucky to be presented with characters who have a lot of contradictions.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

As a reader and a writer, I'm happiest when apparently mutually exclusive states can somehow coexist.