Julian Fellowes Quotes

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

Harsh reality is always better than false hope.

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

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

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

Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.

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

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

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.

Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyones consideration.

Most of us don't want to be outsiders.

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.

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

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

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

I can be as contrary as I choose.

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.

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

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

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

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

My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.

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

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

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

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?

War makes early risers of us all.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!”

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.

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

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

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

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.

Nothing is harder to dramatize than happiness.

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

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.

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.

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

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.