Julian Fellowes Quotes

You know, I'm not a revolutionary.

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.

The business of life is learning that you can't lay down the terms.

We all have chapters we would prefer unpublished.

At my age, one must ration one's excitement

We don't really like rules. We think, in some way, they are an infringement of liberty.

I think every period - except for the 14th century, or something - has some merits.

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.

Ninety-eight per cent of actors who actually make a living do so in front of a camera.

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.

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.

My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.

In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.

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.

Is my gardener's pride to be sacrificed on the altar of Mr Molesley's ambitions?
- The Dowager Countess(Maggie Smith)

Do you think he's the murderer?"
"It's worse than that
he's an actor!

Bought marmalade? Oh dear, I call that very feeble.

I think America has dealt with - I mean, this is simplistic, and of course I don't live in America - but the impression I get is that there is not a kind of obligation to dislike those who are better off or be frightened of those who are worse off.

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.

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.

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.

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.'

I just don't believe in generalisations.

When young and clever men are angry, they either explode or achieve great things.

Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyone's consideration.

For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban.

Sometimes the weekend gets hijacked by work, but as my mother would say, this is the right problem.

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?

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.

I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.

A lot of actors find it impossible not to ask for the audience's sympathy. They have a need to twinkle.

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.

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.

I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.

She said I'd poison his mind and make him a fascist.
I said she'd poison his body and make him an addict.

Of course I love winning things; I can't tell you how much I enjoy it.

We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

War makes early risers of us all.

Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy. All this I am fully aware of. I know too, however, that of the four great gifts that the fairies may or may not bring to the christening – Brains, Birth, Beauty and Money – it is Beauty that makes locked doors spring open at a touch. Whether it is for a job interview, a place at a dining table, a brilliant promotion or a lift on the motorway, everyone, regardless of their sex or their sexual proclivity, would always rather deal with a good-looking face. And no one is more aware of this than the Beauties themselves. They have a power they simultaneously respect and take for granted. Despite the moralists who tut about its transience, it is generally a power that is never completely lost. One can usually trace in the wrinkled lines of a nonagenarian, stooped and leaning on a stick, the style and confidence that turned heads in a ballroom in 1929.

He's lived a fiction. And, of course, he thinks that if you love someone enough, they will love you. And that if you steer things enough, things will, under your control, come right. And this is the fiction of the controller: a controller thinks that they can control their life into being what they want it to be. But their life will never be what they want it to be until they stop controlling, and that is their journey.

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.

How many of us, having cried bitter, rancid tears over a failed love, are actually disappointed when we discover, seeing the adored one again, that all trace of their power over us is gone? How often one has resisted the freedom-giving knowledge that they have actually begun to irritate us as that seems like the worst kind of disloyalty to our own dreams. No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.

The longer one knows people the less relevant it becomes whether or not one liked them initially.

He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance

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.

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.

Henry Denton: You Brits really don't have a sense of humor do you?
Elsie: We do if something's funny, sir.

Well, you've got to be known for something. The danger of extreme versatility is that you don't spring to mind for anything.

Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

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?

The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.

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.

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.

I don't mean to be rude'- always a precursor to rudeness of the most offensive sort

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.

If you're supposed to be a 'personality,' then you might as well have a personality.

You never know people, do you? You can work with 'em for twenty years; you don't know 'em at all.

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.

There are some men who are frightened by strong women and some men who are nurtured by them and feel nervous, with weak clinging vines. And I am very much of the latter category.

I'm not romantic. But I shall think that the heart has other uses, rather than just pumping blood.

Lady Sylvia McCordle: Mr Weissman
Tell us about the film you're going to make.
Morris Weissman: Oh, sure. It's called "Charlie Chan In London". It's a detective story.
Mabel Nesbitt: Set in London?
Morris Weissman: Well, not really. Most of it takes place at a shooting party in a country house. Sort of like this one, actually. Murder in the middle of the night, a lot of guests for the weekend, everyone's a suspect. You know, that sort of thing.
Constance: How horrid. And who turns out to have done it?
Morris Weissman: Oh, I couldn't tell you that. It would spoil it for you.
Constance: Oh, but none of us will see it.

I like to take a long time over breakfast, and I can't bear to talk. If a guest is a breakfast talker it's very important to invite another so they can talk to each other. Otherwise they spoil the newspaper reading and everything else.

I'm seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don't think is unfair.

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.

I envy people who can think, 'No, I'm not going to work today' when they have a huge pile of deadlines stacking up.

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.

The '20s are a very interesting period to me.

Mary: "Don't be spiky, when I only want what you want – for you and Tony to walk into the sunset together."
Mabel: "Then why turn up looking like a cross between a Vogue fashion plate and a case of dynamite?"
Mary: "Well, I can't make it too easy for him.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

Lawyers are always confident before the verdict. It's only after that they share their doubts.

The price of great love is great misery when one of you dies.

When you are desperate to get someone who isn't all that interested in you, you lay siege as hard as you can.

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.

One of the great injustices in fiction is that on the whole people with romantic yearnings have romantic faces. But in real life it's not always like that.

I can be as contrary as I choose.

corner of the Green Park and Piccadilly, Maria knew

Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?

Realization of a dream brings resentment in its wake.

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.

People tend to view history as if it were another planet and think the modern world was invented in 1963. I don't agree.

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.

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.

Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the "interesting failure" or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.

I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don't we?

To me, all success is a delightful surprise, since one can absolutely never predict it.

She preferred to be at the receiving end of envy than pity.

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.

If we don't respect the past, we'll find it harder to build a future.

The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.

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?

I think other people's depression is frightfully dreary, don't you?