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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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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'm for people clinging. I'm pro-clinging.
Whit Stillman
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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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[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.
Whit Stillman
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I think it's helpful to aspire to make films if you feel that other people are not doing what you want to do.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.
Whit Stillman
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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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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.
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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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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.
Whit Stillman
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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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The Cha-Cha is no more ridiculous than life itself.
Whit Stillman