Julian Fellowes
I'm seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don't think is unfair.
Of course I love winning things; I can't tell you how much I enjoy it.
One of the things that you're not really in control of - apart from everything - is your smell.
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.
The great houses of Britain have, for centuries, been the guardians of much of our history, not just of the families who built and lived in them, but of the people who worked there, of the local area, of all of us.
I like to take a long time over breakfast, and I can't bear to talk. If a guest is a breakfast talker it's very important to invite another so they can talk to each other. Otherwise they spoil the newspaper reading and everything else.
Sometimes the weekend gets hijacked by work, but as my mother would say, this is the right problem.
I envy people who can think, 'No, I'm not going to work today' when they have a huge pile of deadlines stacking up.
We live a life that is often spent in crowds - parties, festivals and first nights - so it's nice to avoid them.
When people are feeling insecure about their jobs and there are cuts to be made, it's hard to put up an argument that the film industry needs funding.
My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.
I have derived enormous confidence from being a husband and father.
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.Collection: Passion
Harsh reality is always better than false hope.Collection: Reality
Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.Collection: Vulgarity Is
I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.Collection: Bird
If we don't respect the past, we'll find it harder to build a future.Collection: Past
Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.Collection: Three
Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.Collection: Player
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Thinking
We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.Collection: Life
What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.Collection: Week
Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyones consideration.Collection: Mean
What you have to understand about period drama is that it's 'history light.Collection: Drama
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?Collection: Work
War makes early risers of us all.Collection: War
It's the gloomy things that need our help, if everything in the garden is sunny, why meddle?Collection: Garden
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.Collection: Memories
I think other people's depression is frightfully dreary, don't you?Collection: Depression
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."Collection: Party
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.Collection: Mean
If there's one thing I don't look for in a maid, it's discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.Collection: Secret
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.Collection: Friends
I can be as contrary as I choose.Collection: Choices
No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.Collection: People
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!”Collection: Emotional
You never know people, do you? You can work with 'em for twenty years; you don't know 'em at all.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Powerful
Lawyers are always confident before the verdict. It's only after that they share their doubts.Collection: Doubt
You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.Collection: Love You
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Television
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.Collection: Years
The movies are funny, in one way, because you think of everyone being as beautiful as the dawn, but that isn't true.Collection: Beautiful