Julian Fellowes

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.

The business of life is learning that you can't lay down the terms.

When you make your first film, there is a hell of a lot to think about, and you've got to have a gut understanding of your material.

I like people who don't accept boundaries. Like Florence Nightingale. And Napoleon or Louis XIV, though I'm not sure how much I'd have liked to meet them. I admire people who aren't circumscribed by circumstance.

To be honest, when you're running a series and you have an open end, you don't want to limit yourself too much with the choices you've got for a particular character.

My parents came from different backgrounds. My father's was grander than my mother's, so my mother had... to put up with the disapproval of my father's relations.

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

Success means your thoughts are worthy of everyone's consideration.

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

There are some men who are frightened by strong women and some men who are nurtured by them and feel nervous, with weak clinging vines. And I am very much of the latter category.

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

I come from a class which used to be called the gentry - which is nowadays mistakenly used to include the nobility, but in fact is not. The gentry was essentially the untitled landowning class.