Julian Fellowes Quotations

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyones consideration.

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What a difference a day makes, ... The Oscar gave me all these opportunities. It's a magic wand.

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.

There is almost nothing in your house that does not tell something about you.

One of the things that you're not really in control of - apart from everything - is your smell.

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.

He wants to hear their opinions. As an actor, it was what I always craved. You really want as an actor to be treated as one of the grown-ups. Half the time, you are treated as a demented child who has wandered onto the set.

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.

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.

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

You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.

Tom and I wanted to make this film before I won the Oscar, but I couldn't get the backing to set it up, and he wasn't considered big enough to play the lead,

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

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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

He really likes actors. He's not faking it, ... He wants to hear their opinions. As an actor, it was what I always craved. You really want as an actor to be treated as one of the grown-ups. Half the time, you are treated as a demented child who has wandered onto the set.

He really likes actors. He's not faking it,

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.

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.

My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.

Most of us don't want to be outsiders.

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?

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.

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

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 can be as contrary as I choose.

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

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

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.

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 are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.

Vulgarity is no substitute for wit

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

Nothing is harder to dramatize than happiness.

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

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.

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

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

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

I just don't believe in generalisations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!”

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.

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

War makes early risers of us all.

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

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.

Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing?

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 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.'

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.

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

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

Harsh reality is always better than false hope.

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.