Top 80 Julian Fellowes Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Harsh reality is always better than false hope.”

— Julian Fellowes

2. “You are my whole existence and I will love you until my last breath.”

— Julian Fellowes

3. “If we don’t respect the past, we’ll find it harder to build a future.”

— Julian Fellowes

4. “Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.”

— Julian Fellowes

5. “Love is like riding or speaking French. If you don’t learn it young, it’s hard to get the trick of it later.”

— Julian Fellowes

6. “I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.”

— Julian Fellowes

7. “If you are lucky, you have your moment. But it is never more than a moment. You have to enjoy it while it lasts.”

— Julian Fellowes

8. “Sometimes the weekend gets hijacked by work, but as my mother would say, this is the right problem.”

— Julian Fellowes

9. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

10. “It’s the gloomy things that need our help, if everything in the garden is sunny, why meddle?”

— Julian Fellowes

11. “The price of great love is great misery when one of you dies.”

— Julian Fellowes

12. “The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.”

— Julian Fellowes

13. “Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.”

— Julian Fellowes

14. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

15. “War makes early risers of us all.”

— Julian Fellowes

16. “The moment I was introduced to my wife, Emma, at a party I thought, here she is – and 20 minutes later I told her she ought to marry me. She thought I was as mad as a rat. She wouldn’t even give me her telephone number – and she wrote in her diary: ‘A funny little man asked me to marry him.’”

— Julian Fellowes

17. “What you have to understand about period drama is that it’s ’history light.”

— Julian Fellowes

18. “Lawyers are always confident before the verdict. It’s only after that they share their doubts.”

— Julian Fellowes

19. “I envy people who can think, ‘No, I’m not going to work today’ when they have a huge pile of deadlines stacking up.”

— Julian Fellowes

20. “In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.”

— Julian Fellowes

21. “What is a week-end? Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey.”

— Julian Fellowes

22. “Maybe, much later in life, some sensible considerations might play a part in deciding whether to commit your heart to another, but when you’re young you simply select people you are physically attracted to, and then invest them with all sorts of qualities which they probably don’t possess. Or, if they do, it is completely coincidental.”

— Julian Fellowes

23. “Today, people often make the American mistake of confusing acquaintances with friends. The former are there to share life’s pleasures; only the latter should be invited to share one’s problems.”

— Julian Fellowes

24. “School visits are something I do fairly often: I always say to the students that somebody has got to end up with the interesting careers, so why not them?”

— Julian Fellowes

25. “When you are desperate to get someone who isn’t all that interested in you, you lay siege as hard as you can.”

— Julian Fellowes

26. “To me, all success is a delightful surprise, since one can absolutely never predict it.”

— Julian Fellowes

27. “When people are feeling insecure about their jobs and there are cuts to be made, it’s hard to put up an argument that the film industry needs funding.”

— Julian Fellowes

28. “Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them.”

— Julian Fellowes

29. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

30. “For most directors, the scriptwriter is about as welcome on set as a member of the Taliban.”

— Julian Fellowes

31. “Maggie Smith has a unique sense of comedy, based on a somewhat ironic view of real life, making it both funnier and more sad. But perhaps her greatest ability, or at least the one that most intrigues me, is how she can convey deep and powerful emotion without a trace of sentimentality.”

— Julian Fellowes

32. “Great grief can be worn charmingly by a beauty and I have seen a lot of gracious dignity at funerals in my time but it is my experience that when grief is becoming it is also suspect. Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul. I blush to recall that I was surprised that Charles – nice, bluff Charles with his shooting and his hedgerows and his dogs – had a heart that could be broken. But he had and I was there to witness its breaking.”

— Julian Fellowes

33. “The business of life is learning that you can’t lay down the terms.”

— Julian Fellowes

34. “I’m seen as a chronicler of the class system, which I don’t think is unfair.”

— Julian Fellowes

35. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

36. “I think it’s always a challenge to adapt something from one medium to another – a novel into a film or a play into a movie or whatever.”

— Julian Fellowes

37. “No, while most people have been at their unhappiest when in love, it is nevertheless the state the human being yearns for above all.”

— Julian Fellowes

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

— Julian Fellowes

39. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

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

— Julian Fellowes

41. “Nothing is harder to dramatize than happiness.”

— Julian Fellowes

42. “Of course I love winning things; I can’t tell you how much I enjoy it.”

— Julian Fellowes

43. “There are many nations that have perfected a particular room. You know, you have the French drawing-room, the Austrian ball room, the German dining room, and I think the library is a room the English get right.”

— Julian Fellowes

44. “You must decide whether you wish to get on with your children or live at war with them.”

— Julian Fellowes

45. “If you’re in the movie or in television, your failures are very public, and so are your successes. You weigh them up against each other, really.”

— Julian Fellowes

46. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

47. “I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.”

— Julian Fellowes

48. “The movies are funny, in one way, because you think of everyone being as beautiful as the dawn, but that isn’t true.”

— Julian Fellowes

49. “Education. Experience. Or are they the same thing?”

— Julian Fellowes

50. “One of the great injustices in fiction is that on the whole people with romantic yearnings have romantic faces. But in real life it’s not always like that.”

— Julian Fellowes