I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Welles frames artistic integrity as a principled refusal to be fashionable. To be “with it” suggests aligning oneself with prevailing tastes, trends, or ideological orthodoxies; Welles claims to “passionately hate” that posture because it risks turning art into mere social compliance. By insisting the artist must be “out of step,” he casts creativity as inherently oppositional: the artist sees differently, resists consensus, and therefore produces work that can unsettle or reorient an audience rather than flatter it. The remark also reflects Welles’s self-mythology as an independent, embattled innovator—someone whose value lies in friction with his era, not smooth assimilation into it.