Movies have now reached the same stage as sex - it's all technique and no feeling.

- Penelope Gilliatt

Funniness is the wild card in the pack.

- Penelope Gilliatt

jokes are ideally pleasurable. They are an act of assassination without a corpse, a moment of total annihilation that paradoxically makes anything po…

- Penelope Gilliatt

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 j…

- Penelope Gilliatt

[On John Cleese:] He sometimes seems to swat at his own thoughts as if they were bees.

- Penelope Gilliatt

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

- Penelope Gilliatt

It [humor] inhabits the marginal.

- Penelope Gilliatt

Great comedy calls large matters into question.

- Penelope Gilliatt

Prague is like a vertical Venice steps everywhere.

- Penelope Gilliatt