Quotes from Julian Fellowes

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.

Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul.

Realization of a dream brings resentment in its wake.

To an outsider it seems a vital ingredient of many marriages that each partner should support the illusions of the other.

prietenii, chiar anima?i de cele mai bune inten?ii, pot ucide multe iubiri inca din fa??-

It is a truism but it is still true that the longer one knows people the less relevant it becomes whether or not one liked them initially.

When grief is becoming, it is also suspect.

The fact that someone is not particularly intelligent is no guide in these things. People may be stupid and extremely complicated just as they can be clever and incapable of deep feeling.

Bought marmalade? Oh dear, I call that very feeble.

Great grief can be worn charmingly by a beauty and I have seen a lot of gracious dignity at funerals in my time but is my experience that when grief is becoming it is also suspect. Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul.

Although 'L.A. Confidential' is a long movie, there's never a moment when you think, 'I'm loving this... but when's dinner?' Each time I see it, I discover something I hadn't noticed before. It has a tremendous skill in developing all the subplots.

One of the things that you're not really in control of - apart from everything - is your smell.

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.

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

A lot of actors find it impossible not to ask for the audience's sympathy. They have a need to twinkle.

Sometimes you watch one of your favorite shows from 20 years ago and you think, 'I'm loving this, but golly, it's going at the speed of a snail.'

You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.

I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance.

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

You see, in America, it's quite standard for an actor to sign, at the beginning of a series, for five or seven years. The maximum any British agent will allow you to have over an actor is three years.

I don't think I'm an unkind person, I don't think my books are unkind, and I don't think my readers are unkind.

I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.

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.

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.