Orson Welles Quotes

My fondest memories are generally the day after Thanksgiving. I get the total decorating Christmas itch.

I love Christmas. I'm totally the 'decorate early, start listening to Christmas songs super-early' guy.

People have their special room for Christmas. One year my mum left her present on the arm of the sofa and it was still there the following Christmas!

Our tree was so puny we used orthopedic bulbs.

Some grow young, some grow cold...

Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.

Now the swinging bridge Is quieted with creepers ... Like our tendrilled life.

The cancer of time is eating us away

To repair the irreparable ravages of time.

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

We live ruins amid ruins.

I don't think you can ever return, really.

An age that melts in unperceiv'd decay, And glides in modest innocence away.

Why should we be startled by death? Life is a constant putting off of the mortal coil - coat, cuticle, flesh and bones, all old clothes.

It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.

Britain is not the same anymore of course. It's never the same.

For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay.

Time is the great workman of Nature.

If you have only two or three things that you can enjoy and they are things which time and decay may remove from you, what are you going to do in old age?

It's just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they've made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty.

Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry.

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten when their noblest and most enduring works decay?

If I come back, it will be a place, but it won't be a home any longer.

Now at my age I understand how sad it must have been for some directors or actors at the time the talkies began. Because, really, a whole continent disappeared.