Quotes from Whit Stillman

You can be an American or an Englishman or Canadian and be a Parisian. It's a very admirable culture, and people want to identify with it.

I think one of the saving illusions of the film business is everything seems like it's about to happen. It's always about to happen. It's only looking back that you see the wasteland.

A lot of people in the film industry are fatalists who think a worthwhile film will always achieve its destiny, and the films that aren't worthwhile won't. It's all sort of pre-determined, etc. And I don't think that's true at all.

Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in 'War and Peace.' They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.

My friends in Paris are writers, or something like that, whereas my friends in New York are doing cool stuff in finance and living very different lives. In writing, it's pretty solitary, so it doesn't really matter who's around.

One of the reasons it's important to make a new project is it always seems to improve the reputations of the previous one. Whatever you did before is better than what you've just done, apparently. But I've had to follow the first rule of journalism: Never read the comments.

I find it preferable not to have public opinions about anything. It's good for me to shut up.

If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

Making a show is such a long process. You go through a TV production house that will commission scripts, and if they like what you've written, they take it to a network and sell it to them. It has always felt very far away from something that's actually real.

A very sad moment for me was when my parents separated - a lot of crying, 'It's tragic, we're now a broken family, blah blah blah blah blah' - although my psychological problems stopped. I actually felt healthier.

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn't really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

The only way to end up in the perfect future is to invent it yourself.

My guilty pleasure is watching the Investigation Discovery channel.

I'm the ayatollah of the Jane Austen fan base! I want to lead the fan base, not be attacked and devoured by the fan base.

That's why I hate the outlines and treatments, because all you get are cliches. If you put things down on paper as your plan, it's very hard to get those ideas out of your head and do something better.

My theory in the '90s was that I didn't want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee 'Sense and Sensibility' was beautiful, but other ones, I didn't think justice was being done. It's not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

I remember trying to write at 1, 1:30 A.M., and just sort of falling asleep. And I think that was actually a good creative state for weird ideas. I shifted to a morning schedule once I had two kids, and I still found that if I slept badly, I actually had better ideas.

There's certain key dance crazes that are just so much fun - wouldn't that be a great thing to do, to invent a dance?

I love writing novels, but I'm very fearful about writing something from absolute scratch. I kind of don't have the time to write something from scratch. I think when my knees completely give out, and I can't make films anymore, I would try to write novels from scratch.

At the New York Harvard Club, they've moved the memorial for those who died in World Wars I and II up to an obscure little hallway; they used to be in the main hall, in the most prominent location. The sacrifice of those young people I always found so stunning and so admirable.

I don't think you change from the time you're 16 until you die. Maybe your body changes, and you have different experiences, but I think you become a fully conscious soul with full abilities. Souls are eternal, and if you keep your marbles until you croak in your 90s or your 100s, you're the same.

I'm very troubled when editors oblige their film critics to read the novel before they see the film. Reading the book right before you see the film will almost certainly ruin the film for you.

Sometimes, people who are very fastidious about what they're going to do in their work are not very fastidious in their private life. I'm like that. I love it when people do really nice things around me, but I don't have time to do it for myself. It's very hard for me to even buy a new pair of trousers.

Generally, I like people's trunk projects, the things they were working on before anyone knew who they were. I think when people run out of their trunk items and they start doing stuff just to do a film next year, the quality goes down, the interest goes down. Maybe it feels commercial or something.