Julian fellowes quotes

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.

Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.

My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.

Most of us don't want to be outsiders.

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.

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.'

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

My own belief is that most people are trying to do their best. It doesn't mean they have no nasty side, or that they don't have a bad temper, or that they have never done anything they feel ashamed of. But fiction operates on people waking up trying to be horrible, and I don't think most people are trying to be horrible.

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

What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.

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

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

Nothing is harder to dramatize than happiness.

If you are lucky, you have your moment. But it is never more than a moment. You have to enjoy it while it lasts.

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

War makes early risers of us all.

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.

If there's one thing I don't look for in a maid, it's discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.

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.

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

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."

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.

I just don't believe in generalisations.

Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyones consideration.

The movies are funny, in one way, because you think of everyone being as beautiful as the dawn, but that isn't true.

What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.

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!”

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.

We live a life that is often spent in crowds - parties, festivals and first nights - so it's nice to avoid them.

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

It's the gloomy things that need our help, if everything in the garden is sunny, why meddle?

Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.

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.

Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing?

I have derived enormous confidence from being a husband and father.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I love 'Sex and the City;' I think I've seen every episode.

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.

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.

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

You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.

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.

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.

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?

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

No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.

Harsh reality is always better than false hope.

I mean the truth is, I've always been interested in the whole setup of the old world.

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

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

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.

Lust, that state commonly known as 'being in love,' is a kind of madness. It is a distortion of reality so remarkable that it should, by rights, enable most of us to understand the other forms of lunacy with the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. But, paradoxically, mad and suffering as one is, and the heat of the flame, few of us are glad as we feel that passion slip away No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.

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.

I can be as contrary as I choose.

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

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

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

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

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

I always loved movies and the cinema; we always used to go to see films as a family.

Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.