Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by Penelope Gilliatt

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist Penelope Gilliatt.
Last updated on November 9, 2024.
Penelope Gilliatt

Penelope Gilliatt was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic. As one of the main film critics for The New Yorker magazine in the 1960s and 1970s, Gilliatt was known for her detailed descriptions and evocative reviews. A writer of short stories, novels, non-fiction books, and screenplays, Gilliatt was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971).

Black and white are the most ravishing colors of all in film.
jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible.
[On John Cleese:] He sometimes seems to swat at his own thoughts as if they were bees. — © Penelope Gilliatt
[On John Cleese:] He sometimes seems to swat at his own thoughts as if they were bees.
The masters of the comic spirit are often our prophets.
Funniness is the wild card in the pack.
Great comedy calls large matters into question.
Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life.
[On Watermelon Man:] ... it is impossible to look at this film without its giving you a share in its insane bad taste, which is rather companionable of it.
Prague is like a vertical Venice steps everywhere.
People in a temper often say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean.
A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.
Movies have now reached the same stage as sex - it's all technique and no feeling.
Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have curiosity? Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces.
It [humor] inhabits the marginal.
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