Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Julian Fellowes - Page 2

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

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

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.

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

Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyones consideration.

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.

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

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

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

Harsh reality is always better than false hope.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

War makes early risers of us all.

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

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

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

Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing?

I can be as contrary as I choose.

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.

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

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.

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."

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.

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!”