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I originally wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but failed.

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
Fitzgerald
Scott
Originally
Failed
Wanted

More quotes by Whit Stillman

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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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There's some people who are just very dynamic about social life, and it can be some pretty crazy stuff, but you end up meeting people you like.
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[Jerome David] Salinger was really taken to the cleaners by nasty critics in his day. I think Joan Didion was one of the people who attacked him in a very unfair way.
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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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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 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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Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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[ 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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I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.
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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 call the '70s the golden age of television in the early '70s there were sensationally good shows.
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Find someone hypersocial and crazy and try not to follow them to their doom, but to make friends with their nicer friends.
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I think crazy people are helpful, crazy people who are the catalysts who make other things happen for everyone else. It's almost as if they're not really making things happen in their own life, but their hyperactivity is triggered for everyone else.
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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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One of the problems of a director on the set is that we become overwhelmed by all the factors and threads of production, that sometimes we can't focus on our main job, which is steering the performances to create the whole film.
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