Penelope Gilliatt

Penelope Gilliatt (née Penelope Ann Douglass Conner; 25 March 1932 – 9 May 1993) was an English novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film critic.

Quotes

• It would be unfair to suggest that one of the most characteristic sounds of the English Sunday is the sound of Harold Hobson barking up the wrong tree.
  • In Encore magazine (November–December 1959); cited in The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (1991), p. 90

• People in a temper often say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean.
  • Quoted in Katharine Whitehorn, View from a Column (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), p. 37

• Filmmaking has now reached the same stage as sex—it’s all technique and no feeling.
  • Quoted in Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion, 9th ed. (London: Grafton Books, 1988), p. 143

• Jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible.
  • To Wit: In Celebration of Comedy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1990), preface

• A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.
  • To Wit: Skin and Bones of Comedy (New York: Scribner's and Macmillan, 1990), captioning an image of Lenny Bruce

A State of Change (1967)

New York: Random House

• Boston is one of the few American cities that regrets the past...Boston's like England. Up to its ears in yellowing photographs.
  • Pt. 1, ch. 7 (p. 77)

• "Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have curiosity?"
  "Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces."
  • Pt. 2, ch. 8 (p. 102)

• Russians have always been hugely concerned with ethics and hardly at all with conduct.
  • Pt. 2, ch. 10 (p. 133)

Three-Quarter Face (1980)

New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

• Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life.
  • 24 June 1974 (p. 225)

• Black and white are the most ravishing colors of all in film.
  • 21 June 1977 (p. 277)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Penelope Gilliatt on Wikipedia