Quotes from Whit Stillman

I'm very concerned about the countries bordering Russia. But let's stay off that stuff.

With all my films, the pace is not very fast, and so people get bored with them and comment that they're just people talking in rooms and all that.

I was in Paris for nine years, starting in '98. One of the great things when I was first there were these wonderful CD collections, selling for almost nothing. For ten euros, you'd get three CDs of all the Gershwin songs.

Paris is the destination for brokenhearted American women. I think men go there and have their hearts broken, but women come there with their hearts broken.

I've learned that I really want to shoot short films on a short schedule. There can be very good films that run 110 minutes, but 90 minutes is beautiful.

I kind of put people from the past up on a pedestal; I don't think, in a lot of ways, that we're at their level.

I think my favorite two words are 'true blue.' I think those words are really important, and the spirit of them has been lost.

I've had no money, absolutely, from my family. They paid for a good education - or schools that purported to be a good education - but, um, not a dime.

It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.

Whether for company or isolation or just to make it a pleasurable experience, I have music in my ears all the time. I tend to listen to the same things, so I don't really pay too much attention to it. But it's there, and it's nice, and I do pay more attention to it than I probably should. I think, 'How can I use this music in something?'

I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes.

I identify entirely with Jane Austen's point of view, on everything.

I didn't realize how limiting an R rating is. I made 'Disco' as a cautionary tale for 14- and 15-year-old girls, and those girls were not allowed to see the film by their parents.

I love watching the romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s. I used to have a rule that if Tony Randall's in it, it can't be bad.

What I find remarkable is that so much of the 18th century literature that I read is more accessible than reading your alternative weekly from ten years ago. People really aspired to write clearly.

Categorizing people economically and hating them because you think they're this way is a prejudice.

I'm totally devoted to '30s cinema.

There are bad preppies and bad priests and bad humanitarians. Any group can have its bad apple.

I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of.

I love making cheap films. I really do. What I've found is that I work better when it's both a fairly low budget and a short schedule. It focuses the mind, and it's a better atmosphere.

I'm anti-verite. I think the verite style is a completely false thing. Most things are false to arrive at a truth; verite is falsity without acknowledging its falsity.

The cinema I particularly love is the cinema of the golden age of the studios in the 1930s. One of the really nice things about it was the way teams of actors and directors and crew people worked together again and again.

I had, in college, a professor called Walter Jackson Bate, and he taught a course called The Age of Johnson. It's about Samuel Johnson and his period, 18th-century British writing. So we all got to endure Samuel Johnson, and Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' is now my favorite book. I read it all the time I can; it's great for going to sleep.

The thing that was most harmful was that there was always something that was about to happen. So I found myself indulging in the writer's luxury of doing another draft, another idea. If this project isn't happening, then I'll shelve one script and start writing another. And in that way, the years go by, and there's very little money coming in.