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Penelope Gilliatt

  • Black and white are the most ravishing colors of all in film.

  • Rosalia is dressed in raven clothes forty years too old for her, so that she seems to be in mourning for her life ...

  • People in a temper often say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • in Katharine Whitehorn, View From a Column ()
  • Movies have now reached the same stage as sex — it's all technique and no feeling.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • in Joseph McBride, Filmmakers on Filmmaking ()
  • Funniness is the wild card in the pack.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • It [humor] inhabits the marginal.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • Humor is subversive.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • ... jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything possible.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • Great comedy calls large matters into question.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • [On Watermelon Man:] ... it is impossible to look at this film without its giving you a share in its insane bad taste, which is rather companionable of it ...

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • The masters of the comic spirit are often our prophets.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()
  • [On John Cleese:] He sometimes seems to swat at his own thoughts as if they were bees.

    • Penelope Gilliatt,
    • To Wit
    • ()

Penelope Gilliatt, English writer, screenwriter, film critic

(1932 - 1993)