Top 137 Quotes & Sayings by Whit Stillman - Page 3

I think a lot of ["Cosmopolitans"] is marked by [Jerome David] Salinger. Salinger wouldn't allow his works to be adapted for film after his experience with "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut," and I think that's great for us because then we have to do our own Salinger stories.

You can't go by what the governments say or do. It's not the governments. It's on the street where there's more hatred of Americans in Britain than in France.

It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.

It becomes a lot better for the actors when we're 'shooting, shooting, shooting,' instead of waiting around in a trailer for something to happen.

I'm for people clinging. I'm pro-clinging.

Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'

I've had no money, absolutely, from my family. They paid for a good education - or schools that purported to be a good education - but, um, not a dime.

I think it's helpful to aspire to make films if you feel that other people are not doing what you want to do.

The creation of a film starts with an idea, a notion of a time period or characters, and you get really excited about the idea, and sell it to others if you need their support to write the script. You can't wait to get started, and then you try to start, and you struggle with the blank page, and you get some ideas, and they're bad ideas, and you write bad stuff. It's really bad.

There's a big difference between having relatives who have money and actually having it yourself. Just because you have a cousin who has a lot of money doesn't mean he shares it with you. Or that you'd ask him for a loan.

I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.

[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.

I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.

Decline and Fall was a very depressing Evelyn Waugh novel, I think it was his first. I didn't get it at all, and then I got to love Waugh. And I think that maybe "Cosmopolitans" has a bit of an Evelyn Waugh vibe to it at some point.

We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.

In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.

I think it's really good and helpful to have the people you most admire in some other discipline than what you work in. It's too intimidating and derivative to be just totally gobsmacked by someone doing exactly the same thing as you are.