Quotes from Julian Fellowes

You know, I'm not a revolutionary.

I love 'Sex and the City;' I think I've seen every episode.

Ninety-eight per cent of actors who actually make a living do so in front of a camera.

The '20s are a very interesting period to me.

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.

I don't seem to have ever had a plan, but I have always been quite good at walking through doors when they are opened. I am never any good at anticipating what will happen next, but I always go for it when it does.

If you're supposed to be a 'personality,' then you might as well have a personality.

Cu toata c? majoritatea oamenilor s-au simÈ›it cît se poate de nefericiÈ›i in perioada cît au fost îndr?gostiÈ›i, aceasta este starea dup? care fiinÈ›a uman? tînjeÈ™te mai presus de toate.

She preferred to be at the receiving end of envy than pity.

Their pretensions are naked and vulnerable and for that reason, to me at least, rather charming.

it is better to be gullible than suspicious.

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

Constance: Tell me, what happened to William's little maid? I never saw her again after that dinner. Mary Maceachran: Elsie? -- She's gone. Constance: Oh, it's a pity, really. I thought it was a good idea to have someone in the house who is actually sorry he's dead.

Anne Trenchard was a practical woman, and one of her chief virtues was that she did not linger over a disaster but sought, almost immediately, to remedy what could be remedied and to accept what could not.

In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.

Why do we spend so much of our lives making blameless people unhappy?

She said I'd poison his mind and make him a fascist. I said she'd poison his body and make him an addict.

at my age, one must ration one's excitement

It was possible for couples to not discover that they are in profound disagreement over the very fundamentals of life until ten or twenty years of marriage.

Mary: "Don't be spiky, when I only want what you want – for you and Tony to walk into the sunset together." Mabel: "Then why turn up looking like a cross between a Vogue fashion plate and a case of dynamite?" Mary: "Well, I can't make it too easy for him.

Morris Weissman [on the phone, discussing casting for his movie]: What about Claudette Colbert? She's British, isn't she? She sounds British. Is she, like, affected or is she British?

He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance

I'm a woman, Mary. I can be as contrary as I choose.

As a rule the Holloywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money - and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years.