Top 100 Julian Fellowes Quotes
#1. We live a life that is often spent in crowds - parties, festivals and first nights - so it's nice to avoid them.
Julian Fellowes
#2. We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.
Julian Fellowes
#4. Today, people often make the American mistake of confusing acquaintances with friends. The former are there to share life's pleasures; only the latter should be invited to share one's problems.
Julian Fellowes
#5. A lot of actors find it impossible not to ask for the audience's sympathy. They have a need to twinkle.
Julian Fellowes
#6. In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.
Julian Fellowes
#9. In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.
Julian Fellowes
#10. People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree.
Julian Fellowes
#11. The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is - and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn't even give me her telephone number - and she wrote in her diary: 'A funny little man asked me to marry him.'
Julian Fellowes
#12. I mean the truth is, I've always been interested in the whole setup of the Old World.
Julian Fellowes
#14. I think other people's depression is frightfully dreary, don't you?
Julian Fellowes
#15. Plenty of friendships are sustainable through dinners and lunches, but will not stand a week away. So be careful with whom you go on holiday.
Julian Fellowes
#16. I envy people who can think, 'No, I'm not going to work today' when they have a huge pile of deadlines stacking up.
Julian Fellowes
#17. I think I have a very detailed sense of observation. I am interested in the details of people's lives and what information these details give.
Julian Fellowes
#18. She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.
Julian Fellowes
#20. She preferred to be at the receiving end of envy than pity.
Julian Fellowes
#21. The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.
Julian Fellowes
#22. You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.
Julian Fellowes
#23. There are many nations that have perfected a particular room. You know, you have the French drawing-room, the Austrian ball room, the German dining room, and I think the library is a room the English get right.
Julian Fellowes
#24. You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.
Julian Fellowes
#25. What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.'
Julian Fellowes
#26. We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.
Julian Fellowes
#28. What's difficult for American audiences is that they're used to a system here where you can get an actor for five years or even seven, and that is signed for at the audition. Whereas in England, no agent will give you an actor for more than three years.
Julian Fellowes
#29. In my defence I can only say that her past, too, like mine, like everyone's in fact, was a locked box. Occasionally we allow people a peep, but generally only at the top level. The darker streams of our memories we negotiate alone.
Julian Fellowes
#30. When people are feeling insecure about their jobs and there are cuts to be made, it's hard to put up an argument that the film industry needs funding.
Julian Fellowes
#31. Do you think he's the murderer?"
"It's worse than that
he's an actor!
Julian Fellowes
#32. moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to
Julian Fellowes
#33. I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits.
Julian Fellowes
#34. I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don't we?
Julian Fellowes
#35. Oliver did not seem to understand that the only real fulfilment on this earth was to be gained through hard work. Life as a series of momentary pleasures satisfied no one. He needed to make an investment in it, an investment of himself.
Julian Fellowes
#36. What does she do?"
"She's a producer." Of course, in Los Angeles this doesn't mean much more than "she's a member of the human race.
Julian Fellowes
#37. Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming.
Julian Fellowes
#38. To me, all success is a delightful surprise, since one can absolutely never predict it.
Julian Fellowes
#39. Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?
Julian Fellowes
#40. I don't think I'm an unkind person, I don't think my books are unkind, and I don't think my readers are unkind.
Julian Fellowes
#41. I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.
Julian Fellowes
#42. Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.
Julian Fellowes
#43. Love is like riding or speaking French. If you don't learn it young, it's hard to get the trick of it later.
Julian Fellowes
#44. Although 'L.A. Confidential' is a long movie, there's never a moment when you think, 'I'm loving this ... but when's dinner?' Each time I see it, I discover something I hadn't noticed before. It has a tremendous skill in developing all the subplots.
Julian Fellowes
#45. Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyone's consideration.
Julian Fellowes
#47. CLARKSON: Are you fond of babies? VIOLET: Of course. CLARKSON: What's your favourite age? VIOLET: About sixteen.
Julian Fellowes
#48. She said I'd poison his mind and make him a fascist.
I said she'd poison his body and make him an addict.
Julian Fellowes
#49. My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had ... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.
Julian Fellowes
#50. To an outsider it seems a vital ingredient of many marriages that each partner should support the illusions of the other.
Julian Fellowes
#51. I'm seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don't think is unfair.
Julian Fellowes
#52. The business of life is learning that you can't lay down the terms.
Julian Fellowes
#54. Sometimes the weekend gets hijacked by work, but as my mother would say, this is the right problem.
Julian Fellowes
#55. Henry Denton: You Brits really don't have a sense of humor do you?
Elsie: We do if something's funny, sir.
Julian Fellowes
#56. I always loved movies and the cinema; we always used to go to see films as a family.
Julian Fellowes
#57. Well, you've got to be known for something. The danger of extreme versatility is that you don't spring to mind for anything.
Julian Fellowes
#59. Every writer has to make an emotional journey from artist sitting in attic to being part of a business. The writer of a film is like Tinkerbell. You are only there because people believe in you. The moment they dont, because youre a pain the arse, youve lost.
Julian Fellowes
#60. The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.
Julian Fellowes
#61. Sometimes it is quite surprising, the emotional intensity of it. I was in NY one day, in Barnes and Noble, and I could see this woman following me around and after a bit I stopped and said 'Hello' and she just looked at me and said: "PLEASE LET EDITH BE HAPPY!"
Julian Fellowes
#62. I think it's always a challenge to adapt something from one medium to another - a novel into a film or a play into a movie or whatever.
Julian Fellowes
#64. There isn't much point in the whole 'celebrity' nonsense unless one is prepared to go out on a limb and, one hopes, speak up for some under-represented section of the community.
Julian Fellowes
#65. I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.
Julian Fellowes
#66. When you are desperate to get someone who isn't all that interested in you, you lay siege as hard as you can.
Julian Fellowes
#67. When I was young, men like my father would often come home and put on their smoking jacket over their perfectly ordinary trousers, as a way of relaxing in the evening.
Julian Fellowes
#68. If you're supposed to be a 'personality,' then you might as well have a personality.
Julian Fellowes
#69. Maggie Smith has a unique sense of comedy, based on a somewhat ironic view of real life, making it both funnier and more sad. But perhaps her greatest ability, or at least the one that most intrigues me, is how she can convey deep and powerful emotion without a trace of sentimentality.
Julian Fellowes
#70. He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance
Julian Fellowes
#71. My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.
Julian Fellowes
#72. I'm not romantic. But I shall think that the heart has other uses, rather than just pumping blood.
Julian Fellowes
#73. If there's one thing I don't look for in a maid, it's discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.
Julian Fellowes
#74. I would fight dragons, I would walk over flaming coals, I would enter the Valley of the Dead, if I thought I might have a chance of your heart.
Julian Fellowes
#75. Constance: Tell me, what happened to William's little maid? I never saw her again after that dinner.
Mary Maceachran: Elsie?
She's gone.
Constance: Oh, it's a pity, really. I thought it was a good idea to have someone in the house who is actually sorry he's dead.
Julian Fellowes
#76. I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared.
Julian Fellowes
#77. I don't mean to be rude'- always a precursor to rudeness of the most offensive sort
Julian Fellowes
#78. I think Americans are wonderful film actors - the best in the world - but they are a very contemporary race and they look forward all the time.
Julian Fellowes
#79. Sometimes you watch one of your favorite shows from 20 years ago and you think, 'I'm loving this, but golly, it's going at the speed of a snail.'
Julian Fellowes
#80. The fact that someone is not particularly intelligent is no guide in these things. People may be stupid and extremely complicated just as they can be clever and incapable of deep feeling.
Julian Fellowes
#81. Anne Trenchard was a practical woman, and one of her chief virtues was that she did not linger over a disaster but sought, almost immediately, to remedy what could be remedied and to accept what could not.
Julian Fellowes
#82. I love 'Sex and the City;' I think I've seen every episode.
Julian Fellowes
#83. The great houses of Britain have, for centuries, been the guardians of much of our history, not just of the families who built and lived in them, but of the people who worked there, of the local area, of all of us.
Julian Fellowes
#86. My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.
Julian Fellowes
#87. I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance.
Julian Fellowes
#89. I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.
Julian Fellowes
#90. Of course I love winning things; I can't tell you how much I enjoy it.
Julian Fellowes
#91. If you are lucky, you have your moment. But it is never more than a moment. You have to enjoy it while it lasts.
Julian Fellowes
#92. As a rule the Holloywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money - and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years.
Julian Fellowes
#93. Ninety-eight per cent of actors who actually make a living do so in front of a camera.
Julian Fellowes
#94. Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they're part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?
Julian Fellowes
#95. School visits are something I do fairly often: I always say to the students that somebody has got to end up with the interesting careers, so why not them?
Julian Fellowes
#96. I think the reason why people love 'Downton Abbey' is because all the characters are given the same weight. Some are nice, some are not, but it has nothing to do with class or oppressors versus the oppressed.
Julian Fellowes
#97. Lawyers are always confident before the verdict. It's only after that they share their doubts.
Julian Fellowes
#98. When you make your first film, there is a hell of a lot to think about, and you've got to have a gut understanding of your material.
Julian Fellowes
#99. If you're in the movie or in television, your failures are very public, and so are your successes. You weigh them up against each other, really.
Julian Fellowes
#100. For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban.
Julian Fellowes
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