Julian Fellowes Quotes - Page 3

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.

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.

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

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.

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 can be as contrary as I choose.

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

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

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

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

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!”

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

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

Most of us don't want to be outsiders.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing?

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.

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.

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