Top 100 Julian Fellowes Quotes
#1. 'Downton Abbey' is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order - whose passing 'Downton's' creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns - is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner.
Steve Erickson
#2. Julian Fellowes doesn't come to the set, except maybe once every six weeks, for whatever reason. He's not a producer, in that sense. But if you write him a one-line question, he'll write you a three-page answer.
Hugh Bonneville
#3. None of us had any idea of how successful Downton was going to be. I thought I was signing up for another period drama that had a slightly modern feel. It had a freedom about it because it was coming out of the head of Julian Fellowes. Anything could happen and generally did.
Dan Stevens
#4. I'd done "Gosford Park," a film that Julian Fellowes had written that Robert Altman directed.
Maggie Smith
#5. I loved Robert Altman, so gentle yet naughty! And Julian Fellowes writes so beautifully.
Maggie Smith
#6. Show creator Julian Fellowes echoed the sentiment. "The 'Downton' journey has been amazing for everyone aboard. People ask if we knew what was going to happen when we started to make the first series and the answer is that, of course
Anonymous
#7. We live a life that is often spent in crowds - parties, festivals and first nights - so it's nice to avoid them.
Julian Fellowes
#8. We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.
Julian Fellowes
#9. You see, in America, it's quite standard for an actor to sign, at the beginning of a series, for five or seven years. The maximum any British agent will allow you to have over an actor is three years.
Julian Fellowes
#10. Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing ...
Julian Fellowes
#12. 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
#13. A lot of actors find it impossible not to ask for the audience's sympathy. They have a need to twinkle.
Julian Fellowes
#14. 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
#16. I don't seem to have ever had a plan, but I have always been quite good at walking through doors when they are opened. I am never any good at anticipating what will happen next, but I always go for it when it does.
Julian Fellowes
#18. In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.
Julian Fellowes
#19. Most of the soap operas always use the Christmas special to kill huge quantities of their characters. So they have trams coming off their rails, or cars slamming into each other or burning buildings. It's a general clean-out.
Julian Fellowes
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. I mean the truth is, I've always been interested in the whole setup of the Old World.
Julian Fellowes
#24. I think other people's depression is frightfully dreary, don't you?
Julian Fellowes
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. What the Americans want to see is life in their drama. Life of all sorts: hard lives, easy lives, or lives which, like most of ours, are a mixture of the two.
Julian Fellowes
#29. 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
#30. When young and clever men are angry, they either explode or achieve great things.
Julian Fellowes
#31. What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.
Julian Fellowes
#33. She preferred to be at the receiving end of envy than pity.
Julian Fellowes
#34. The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.
Julian Fellowes
#35. This phenomenon, where the losers of a revolution try to demonstrate their support for, and approval of, the changes that have destroyed them, always fascinates me.
Julian Fellowes
#36. You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.
Julian Fellowes
#37. 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
#38. You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.
Julian Fellowes
#39. What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.'
Julian Fellowes
#40. We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.
Julian Fellowes
#42. The price of great love is great misery when one of you dies.
Julian Fellowes
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Morris Weissman [on the phone, discussing casting for his movie]: What about Claudette Colbert? She's British, isn't she? She sounds British. Is she, like, affected or is she British?
Julian Fellowes
#47. If we don't respect the past, we'll find it harder to build a future.
Julian Fellowes
#48. Do you think he's the murderer?"
"It's worse than that
he's an actor!
Julian Fellowes
#49. moment that the parents of one's friends choose to die or go to
Julian Fellowes
#50. I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits.
Julian Fellowes
#51. I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don't we?
Julian Fellowes
#52. One of the things that you're not really in control of - apart from everything - is your smell.
Julian Fellowes
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming.
Julian Fellowes
#57. The longer one knows people the less relevant it becomes whether or not one liked them initially.
Julian Fellowes
#58. To me, all success is a delightful surprise, since one can absolutely never predict it.
Julian Fellowes
#59. Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?
Julian Fellowes
#61. 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
#62. I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.
Julian Fellowes
#63. Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.
Julian Fellowes
#64. 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
#65. To be honest, when you're running a series and you have an open end, you don't want to limit yourself too much with the choices you've got for a particular character.
Julian Fellowes
#66. 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
#67. Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyone's consideration.
Julian Fellowes
#68. It was possible for couples to not discover that they are in profound disagreement over the very fundamentals of life until ten or twenty years of marriage.
Julian Fellowes
#70. CLARKSON: Are you fond of babies? VIOLET: Of course. CLARKSON: What's your favourite age? VIOLET: About sixteen.
Julian Fellowes
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. To an outsider it seems a vital ingredient of many marriages that each partner should support the illusions of the other.
Julian Fellowes
#74. I'm seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don't think is unfair.
Julian Fellowes
#75. The business of life is learning that you can't lay down the terms.
Julian Fellowes
#77. Sometimes the weekend gets hijacked by work, but as my mother would say, this is the right problem.
Julian Fellowes
#78. The freedom of growing older is that one is no longer obliged to dislike someone simply because they dislike you.
Julian Fellowes
#79. Henry Denton: You Brits really don't have a sense of humor do you?
Elsie: We do if something's funny, sir.
Julian Fellowes
#80. I always loved movies and the cinema; we always used to go to see films as a family.
Julian Fellowes
#81. 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
#84. 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
#85. The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.
Julian Fellowes
#86. 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
#87. I have derived enormous confidence from being a husband and father.
Julian Fellowes
#88. 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
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. It's the gloomy things that need our help, if everything in the garden is sunny, why meddle?
Julian Fellowes
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. If you're supposed to be a 'personality,' then you might as well have a personality.
Julian Fellowes
#98. 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
#99. He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance
Julian Fellowes
#100. 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
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