Quotes by Julian Fellowes

“Separate Lies”

“Hes 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.”

“Tom and I wanted to make this film before I won the Oscar, but I couldnt get the backing to set it up, and he wasnt considered big enough to play the lead,”

“What a difference a day makes, ... The Oscar gave me all these opportunities. Its a magic wand.”

“He really likes actors. Hes not faking it,”

“He really likes actors. Hes not faking it, ... He wants to hear their opinions. As an actor, it was what I always craved. You really want as an actor to be treated as one of the grown-ups. Half the time, you are treated as a demented child who has wandered onto the set.”

“He wants to hear their opinions. As an actor, it was what I always craved. You really want as an actor to be treated as one of the grown-ups. Half the time, you are treated as a demented child who has wandered onto the set.”

Los Angeles is a town where status is all and status is only given to success. Dukes and millionaires and playboys by the dozen may arrive and be glad-handed for a time, but they are unwise if they choose to live there because the town is, perhaps even creditably, committed to recognising only professional success, and nothing else, to be of lasting value. The burdensome obligation imposed on all its inhabitants is therefore to present themselves as successes, because otherwise they forfeit their right to respect in that environment ... There is no place in that town for the interesting failure or for anyone who is not determined on a life that will be shaped in a upward-heading curve.

I would fight dragons, I would walk over flaming coals, I would enter the Valley of the Dead, if I thought I might have a chance of your heart.

Oliver did not seem to understand that the only real fulfilment on this earth was to be gained through hard work. Life as a series of momentary pleasures satisfied no one. He needed to make an investment in it, an investment of himself.

Especially as I was an old friend, or at least I was a person she had known for a long time, which after a certain point is almost the same thing...

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.

Very few Englishmen ever ask a woman anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbors on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements. So is a man does express any curiosity about a woman sitting next to him, about her feelings, about the life she is leading, she will generally tell him anything he cares to know.

Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing?

Do you think hes the murderer?Its worse than that -- hes an actor!

If theres one thing I dont look for in a maid, its discretion. Except with my own secrets, of course.

Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel theyre part of something worthwhile. That, in the last analysis, their life has some meaning in a larger context. The questions is what am I part of? What have I done?

She was at that period of her life that almost everyone must pass through, when childhood is done with and a faux maturity, untrammeled by experience, gives one a sense that anything is possible until the arrival of real adulthood proves conclusively that it is not.

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. Its a general clean-out.

I always like to arrive at the airport early to enjoy breakfast and lounge about so that when I get on the plane all my travel fever has disappeared.