Top 80 Julian Fellowes Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I always loved movies and the cinema; we always used to go to see films as a family.”

— Julian Fellowes

52. “We live a life that is often spent in crowds – parties, festivals and first nights – so it’s nice to avoid them.”

— Julian Fellowes

53. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

54. “Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyones consideration.”

— Julian Fellowes

55. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

56. “I think Americans are wonderful film actors – the best in the world – but they are a very contemporary race and they look forward all the time.”

— Julian Fellowes

57. “Plenty of friendships are sustainable through dinners and lunches, but will not stand a week away. So be careful with whom you go on holiday.”

— Julian Fellowes

58. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

59. “Mr Pope, there is no “Lady Maria and I”. It is an absurd concept. You must understand just this: my daughter is a jewel as far above you as the stars.”

— Julian Fellowes

60. “My mother converted to Catholicism to marry my father.”

— Julian Fellowes

61. “Most of us don’t want to be outsiders.”

— Julian Fellowes

62. “I can be as contrary as I choose.”

— Julian Fellowes

63. “If you’re supposed to be a ‘personality,’ then you might as well have a personality.”

— Julian Fellowes

64. “Ninety-eight per cent of actors who actually make a living do so in front of a camera.”

— Julian Fellowes

65. “She had that uniquely English talent of demonstrating, through her scrupulously polite manner, just how awful she thought the company. She could leave a roomful crushed and rejected and yet congratulate herself on behaving perfectly. It is of course of all forms of rudeness the most offensive as it leaves no room for rebuttal.”

— Julian Fellowes

66. “My childhood was a happy one, spent in a tall house in South Kensington and later in East Sussex, but my early and mid teens were less successful.”

— Julian Fellowes

67. “I just don’t believe in generalisations.”

— Julian Fellowes

68. “You never know people, do you? You can work with ’em for twenty years; you don’t know ’em at all.”

— Julian Fellowes

69. “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.’”

— Julian Fellowes

70. “As a rule the Holloywood pattern for English actors is simple. They are delighted to go, they are told there is a lot of work for them if they stick it out, they tell everyone how fabulous it is, they spend all their money – and then they come home. It seems to take from two to six years.”

— Julian Fellowes

71. “I have derived enormous confidence from being a husband and father.”

— Julian Fellowes

72. “I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don’t we?”

— Julian Fellowes

73. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

74. “I mean the truth is, I’ve always been interested in the whole setup of the Old World.”

— Julian Fellowes

75. “She wasn’t sure if they meant to be hurtful or if they were just profoundly tactless.”

— Julian Fellowes

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

— Julian Fellowes

77. “Things were just as they had been a moment before, and yet somehow the tone and substance had changed.”

— Julian Fellowes

78. “I think every period – except for the 14th century, or something – has some merits.”

— Julian Fellowes

79. “We are usually undone by our lack of understanding of ourselves.”

— Julian Fellowes

80. “He was one of those who manage to combine almost total failure with breathtaking arrogance.”

— Julian Fellowes

81. “Physical beauty is a subject that many skirt around and almost everyone attempts to down-play thereby demonstrating some sound moral stance, but it remains one of the glories of human existence. Of course, there are many people who are attractive without being beautiful just as there are beauties who bore, and the danger of beauty in the very young is that it can make the business of life seem deceptively easy.”

— Julian Fellowes

82. “What’s difficult for American audiences is that they’re used to a system here where you can get an actor for five years or even seven, and that is signed for at the audition. Whereas in England, no agent will give you an actor for more than three years.”

— Julian Fellowes

83. “Nor should they be, but everyone needs to feel they’re 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?”

— Julian Fellowes

84. “In the States, the Abdication story, for example, is portrayed as The World Well Lost For Love while the English, of a certain type anyway, see it only as childish, irresponsible and absurd.”

— Julian Fellowes

85. “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.”

— Julian Fellowes

86. “Real unhappiness is ugly and wounding and scarring to the soul.”

— Julian Fellowes

87. “I think other people’s depression is frightfully dreary, don’t you?”

— Julian Fellowes

88. “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...”

— Julian Fellowes

89. “I’m a woman, Mary. I can be as contrary as I choose.”

— Julian Fellowes