F for Fake (1973)

Elmyr de Hory: Self

Photos 

Quotes 

• Orson Welles : Like all Hungarians, he told the best Hungarian jokes. The omelet, you know that, don't you? Sure. It's a classic. It's in our Hungarian cookbook. To make an omelet, it says, first: steal an egg.

  Elmyr de Hory : Well, naturally. To be Hungarian, it is not a nationality, it is a profession.

  Orson Welles : But the truth about Hungarians, which they do try to cover up, is that they are not any more crooked than the rest of us. But not the way they like to tell it! Of all the Hungarian friends I've ever had, I can't remember one who didn't want me to think of him as a king of con-men.

• Clifford Irving : I've known Elmyr for about eight years. We met when I was broke. When I was writing fiction. I wasn't selling it very well.

  Orson Welles : His fiction didn't sell. Elmyr's biographer's a highly gifted writer. Does it say something for this age of ours that he could only make it big by fakery?

  Elmyr de Hory : Le grande surprise!

  Orson Welles : Cliff Irving's caper may well be the hoax of the century, but, really, this is not, you know, in any way the century of the hoax. We hanky-panky men have always been with you.

  Elmyr de Hory : That's a fact.

  Orson Welles : What's new?

  Clifford Irving : The experts.

  Elmyr de Hory : The so-called experts...

  Orson Welles : Experts are the new oracles.

  Elmyr de Hory : - are greatly pretentious...

  Orson Welles : They speak to us with the absolute authority of the computer.

  Elmyr de Hory : - pretend to know something what they only know very superficially.

  Orson Welles : And we bow down before them. They're God's own gift to the faker.

  Clifford Irving : All the world loves to see the experts and the establishment made a fool of.

• Elmyr de Hory : I don't feel bad for Modigliani. I feel good for me.

• Elmyr de Hory : Those famous staring eyes now stared as eyes had never stared before.

• Elmyr de Hory : I don't admit anything. I just talk about it.

• Elmyr de Hory : Many of these drawings are very weak. Matisse line was never as sure as mine. He was hesitant when he made a drawing, you know. He added to it a little more and a little more. It wasn't as flowing, it wasn't as sure as mine. I had to hesitate! To make it more Matisse-like.

• Elmyr de Hory : Ibiza's not a place for snobbish society. It's not London. It's not Paris. It's not Omaha. It is Ibiza. That's the charm of Ibiza. And that's what makes Ibiza why we like to live here. Ibiza's Ibiza.

• Elmyr de Hory : I was fooled. I was used. And I was squeezed out - squeezed out like a last drop.

• Elmyr de Hory : Here is better than somewhere else; but, a jail's a jail, let's face it.

• Elmyr de Hory : I wasn't a prisoner in the full sense of the word. I was not in prison. I was interred.