Success Quote by Orson Welles

Welles is aiming his knife at a marketplace that rewards the safest bet, then calls it taste. Coming from an actor-director who spent a lifetime ricocheting between genius and budget meetings, the line reads less like a grumpy aphorism and more like a field report: if you want the widest audience, you often have to sand down the very edges that make art worth making. His phrasing is telling. “The best thing commercially” isn’t “good” so much as optimized: engineered for maximum reach, minimum friction, easy export. Then he snaps the hinge the other way - “which is the worst artistically” - a blunt moral contrast dressed up as a business observation.

The “by and large” matters, too. It’s the tiny shrug that keeps the claim credible. Welles isn’t pretending every blockbuster is trash; he’s indicting a system where consensus becomes a proxy for quality because consensus is what scales. Commercial success, in this view, is less a reward for excellence than a reward for legibility: familiar plots, familiar faces, familiar feelings, delivered on schedule.

Context is everything. Welles’s career after Citizen Kane was defined by fights over final cut, studios re-editing his work, and years of scrambling for financing. He knew exactly how the industry converts risk into something manageable, then sells “manageable” as mass appeal. The subtext is personal and political at once: if art threatens to do something strange, it will be negotiated into something sellable, and then it will “succeed.”