"I just want to say this to the British Government... You know what you've just done, don't you? You've destroyed the civil rights movement, and you've given the IRA the biggest victory it will ever have. All over this city tonight, young men... boys will be joining the IRA, and you will reap a whirlwind."

"Stalking a victim is a way of organizing one's loneliness, making a network out of it."

"I knew I must extend myself until the molecules parted and I was spliced into the image."

"Isolation, solitude, secret plotting. A novel is a secret a writer may keep for years before he lets it out of his room. Writers in hiding, writers in prison. Sometimes their secrets turn out to be dangerous to the state machine. For most writers in the West of course this danger is extremely remote. The cells we live in are strictly personal constructions. Let's change the room slightly and imagine another kind of apartness. The outsider who builds a plot around his desperation. A self-watcher, a lonely young man, living in a fiction he hasn't bothered to put down on paper. But this doesn't mean he is unorganized, he organizes everything. This is how he keeps from disappearing. His head is filled with dangerous secrets, and he may finally devise a way to come out of his room. He invents a false name, orders a gun though the mail, then looks around for someone famous he can shoot."

"Don DeLillo writes dangerous fiction. He's been called America's leading contemporary novelist, and his ten novels come directly out of the flow of recent history. The Kennedy assassination, toxic fallout, acts of terrorism; these are all part of the running picture of news against which his books are set. This film was developed in close collaboration with DeLillo. He wanted to use the documentary form to explore the relationships between gunmen and the novelist, words and images, the power of news and the obsession with apocalypse. In doing so he asks, what effect can a novelist have on a culture in which terrorists seem to have hijacked the world's narrative."

"I think it's true that none of my novels could have been written in the world that existed before the assassination. In my fiction there seems to be a sense of danger everywhere, of something unraveling. When Kennedy was shot, something changed for ever in America. Something opened up, a sense of randomness, deep ambiguity, we lost the narrative thread."

"Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think the footage comes close to uncovering some secret about the nature of film itself. Film carries something, some mindstream, some myth that may be common to us all. It's as though the experience of film has acquired a kind of independent existence in our consciousness, it's that deeply embedded. Have to get it on film."

"Today it's news that has begun to influence the way we see the world. It's news that has become so extraordinarily dominant. I think we've come to depend on news, the darker the better. In a way we need it, because it is the tragic narrative of our time."

"Robert James-Collier as Thomas Barrow"

"Phyllis Logan as Elsie Carson"

"Kevin Doyle as Joseph Molesley"

"Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham"

"Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Talbot"

"Hugh Bonneville as Robert Crawley, 7th Earl of Grantham"

"Filming must be the slowest occupation known to man. It makes a glacier look impatient."

"Laura Carmichael as Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham"

"Raquel Cassidy as Phyllis Baxter"

"Jim Carter as Charles Carson"

"Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham"

"Brendan Coyle as John Bates"

"You don't need me to tell you that marriage is a novel, not a short story. Full of plot twists along the way."

"With the money, we can bring the house up to snuff to match what we've spent on the estate. And enter the 1930s with our heads held high."

"[proudly] They'd better be warned. The British are coming!"

"[to Cora, sobbing] My God. To lose my mother and my name. Must I lose you, too? I can't bear it."

"[regarding filming a movie at the Downton home] I think it's a horrible idea! Actresses plastered in make-up, and actors just plastered, scrambling over our things. We'd have to keep counting the spoons in the pantry."

"[to Mary] Women like us fall into two categories: dragons and fools. You must make sure they think of you as a dragon."

"It's more than that. For me, Hollywood is the ultimate dream factory. And I need dreams as much as the next man."

"Penelope Wilton as Isobel Grey, Lady Merton"

"Hugh Dancy as Jack Barber"

"Stop that noise. I can't hear myself die. [The Dowager's last words]"

"Dominic West as Guy Dexter"

"Simon Jones as King George V"

"David Haig as Mr. Wilson"

"Robert James-Collier as Thomas Barrow"

"Allen Leech as Tom Branson"

"Joanne Froggatt as Anna Bates"

"Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Talbot"

"Kevin Doyle as Joseph Molesley"

"Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham"

"Laura Carmichael as Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham"

"Hugh Bonneville as Robert Crawley, 7th Earl of Grantham"

"Jim Carter as Charles Carson"