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It's terrible to write what are essentially comedies for people with no sense of humor. Everyone thinks they have a sense of humor, but observably not.

Whit Stillman

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Whit Stillman
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 25
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
John Whitney Stillman
Thinking
Thinks
People
Humor
Terrible
Comedy
Everyone
Write
Sense
Comedies
Writing
Essentially

More quotes by Whit Stillman

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For me, the present is a golden era. That's the greatest golden era. Right now. I just like pining for lost times.
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[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project.
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That's one of the things I find really bad, is when people not only do injuries to others, but then lie about the others to justify it. It's not bad enough just being bad to someone, but then lying about it.
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Sometimes you don't realize how dependent you are on just a few people, and if they disappear, suddenly you can be thrown on your own resources, which may be limited, and you're really in a fix. So I think that's authentic to the experience that it might be very lonely.
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There's a big difference between having relatives who have money and actually having it yourself. Just because you have a cousin who has a lot of money doesn't mean he shares it with you. Or that you'd ask him for a loan.
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I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.
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I decided the moment I graduated from college that I would never wear blue jeans again. And I have never worn blue jeans again.
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The Cha-Cha is no more ridiculous than life itself.
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You can't go by what the governments say or do. It's not the governments. It's on the street where there's more hatred of Americans in Britain than in France.
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I call the '70s the golden age of television in the early '70s there were sensationally good shows.
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In my father's time - he was in college during many transitions in the late 1930s - they had great institutional loyalties... to his college, eventually the navy, the Democratic Party and certain ideals of our country. Those are the things that became broken with my generation.
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I think it's really good and helpful to have the people you most admire in some other discipline than what you work in. It's too intimidating and derivative to be just totally gobsmacked by someone doing exactly the same thing as you are.
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Mary McCarthy and that Mr. Intellectual kind of guy ... Dwight McDonald? And they were really mean about [Jerome David] Salinger, and oh they were going to destroy him, and just look how thoroughly they destroyed him! No one reads Salinger anymore!
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I love watching the romantic comedies of the late '50s and early '60s. I used to have a rule that if Tony Randall's in it, it can't be bad.
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Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'
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It becomes a lot better for the actors when we're 'shooting, shooting, shooting,' instead of waiting around in a trailer for something to happen.
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I would say on the other side of the equation that there were really some massive sales and massive enthusiasm for some films that were given big releases. And I'm not really sure that happens in quite the same way, small films getting big releases. Maybe it still does, I don't know.
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I think a lot of [Cosmopolitans] is marked by [Jerome David] Salinger. Salinger wouldn't allow his works to be adapted for film after his experience with Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut, and I think that's great for us because then we have to do our own Salinger stories.
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I've had no money, absolutely, from my family. They paid for a good education - or schools that purported to be a good education - but, um, not a dime.
Whit Stillman
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We learned some bad things, and the Vietnam War led to some bad conclusions. We're not the greatest generation, that's for sure.
Whit Stillman