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Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire. -- J. K. Rowling
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature. -- Anne Stevenson
I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture. -- Laura Marling
I love books; my suitcases are always full of them. Books and shoes. I read when I am sad, when I am happy, when I am nervous. My favourite British author is Jane Austen, and my favourite American one is John O'Hara. -- Carolina Herrera
I'm a Jewish Jane Austen. -- Howard Jacobson
If there was a Jane Austen camp, I would go, no question. -- Stephenie Meyer
Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating -- Mark Haddon
Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel. -- Bertrand Russell
Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it. -- Mark Twain
As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents. -- Philip Pullman
If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing. -- Roddy Doyle
I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future. -- Edward Bond
I always advise children who ask me for tips on being a writer to read as much as they possibly can. Jane Austen gave a young friend the same advice, so I'm in good company there. -- J. K. Rowling
[Henry] James is much more complex than Jane Austen. That's why it's not so easy to adapt him. People expect a nice period piece, but that's not always the case. There's a deep human mystery in his work. -- Agnieszka Holland
I would be curious about one of those Jane Austen women -- you know -- long-suffering, dutiful -- but all right in the end -- a plump 19th century type, five foot four, ringlets, brown eyes, long fingers. -- Peter Greenaway
I think the success of 'Downton' is partly because there are effectively 18 leading characters, all given equal importance, so it's enormously involving on many levels. But also, it's a new story. It's not like Dickens or Austen, where everyone knows the denouement. -- Michelle Dockery
But some characters in books are really real--Jane Austen's are; and I know those five Bennets at the opening of Pride and Prejudice, simply waiting to raven the young men at Netherfield Park, are not giving one thought to the real facts of marriage. -- Dodie Smith
Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside. -- Robert Wilson Lynd
It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books. -- Ally Carter
Jane Austen is very amusing. -- James Callis
Each of us has a private Austen. -- Karen Joy Fowler
One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen. -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
To Jane Austen, every fool is a treasure trove. -- Mason Cooley
I've never got on very well with Jane Austen. -- Anita Brookner
I'm a Jane Austen/Jane Eyre kind of girl. -- Maggie Grace
How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel! -- Dodie Smith
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. -- J. K. Rowling
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. -- Joyce Carol Oates
Jane Austen is the feminine Peter Pan of letters. She never grew up. -- George Sampson
I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen. -- Mary McCarthy
I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table. -- A. N. Wilson
After all, what's good enough for Austen ought to be good enough for anyone. -- Mary Ann Shaffer
[On Austen Chamberlain:] He is more loyal to his friends than to his convictions. -- Margot Asquith
It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing. -- Terry Pratchett
Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales. -- Andrew Davies
Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist. -- George Saintsbury
All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading. -- Anna Quindlen
It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding. -- Karen Joy Fowler
Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven. -- Mark Twain
Whatâ??s ready? Was Steinback ready? Hemingway? Shakespeare? Dickens? Jane Austen? They just did it, didnâ??t they? -- Danielle Steel
...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964 -- Harper Lee
'Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness. -- Seth Grahame-Smith
I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature." -- Anne Stevenson
I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro. -- Amy Waldman
Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness. -- Seth Grahame-Smith
Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.' -- Susanna Clarke
Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life. -- Edward Abbey
I'm named after Jane Austen's Emma, and I've always been able to relate to her. She's strong, confident but quite tactless. -- Emma Donoghue
The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers. -- Harold Bloom
Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors. -- Florence King
Because I had grown up with Jane Austen novels and period dramas, I was very familiar with that period and that world. -- Gugu Mbatha-Raw
Now I was more certain than ever of my decision. I could not love a man who did not love Jane Austen. -- Deanna Raybourn
I've never had a study in my life. I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table. -- A. N. Wilson
Jane Austen easily used half a page describing someone else's eyes; she would not appreciate summarizing her reading tastes in ten titles. -- Tracy Chevalier
Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her. -- Jane Gardam
Once I started writing the screenplay of 'Bride & Prejudice,' I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth. -- Gurinder Chadha
Jane Austen can in fact get more drama out of morality than most other writers can get from shipwreck, battle, murder, or mayhem. -- Ronald Blythe
Jane Austen had created six heroines, each quite different, and that gave Charlotte courage. There wasn't just one kind of woman to be. -- Shannon Hale
There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that. -- JJ Feild
Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen. -- Mark Haddon
Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me. -- Anna Quindlen
Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of. -- Julie Walters
Cooper wrote a novel which is absolutely indistinguishable from Austen, completely from a female point of view, completely English, no sense that he was an American. -- Leslie Fiedler
I think as far as the action genre goes, I like when it has a sense of humor. I'm a Jane Austen/Jane Eyre kind of girl. -- Maggie Grace
Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction? -- Virginia Woolf
To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a married man in possession of a vast fortune must be in want of a newer, younger wife. -- Bruce Feirstein
Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible. -- Jessica Brown Findlay
My new favorite title is How Jane Austen Ruined My Life. I don't have the courage to read it, though. I'm afraid to discover she's ruined mine as well. -- Katherine Reay
Before 'Austenland,' I got do a lead role in 'Northanger Abbey', which is Jane Austen. Growing up in England, you can't really ignore Jane Austen. It's always been there. -- JJ Feild
I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen. But maybe that particular delusion was universal. -- Robin Wasserman
Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present. -- Leslie Fiedler
Allegra's Austen wrote about the impact of financial need on the intimate lives of women. If she'd worked in a bookstore, Allegra would have shelved Austen in the horror section. -- Karen Joy Fowler
Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong. -- Cathleen Schine
There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare. -- Margaret Drabble
I boast of being the only man in London who has been bombed off a lavatory seat while reading Jane Austen. She went into the bath; I went through the door. -- Kingsley Martin
Because I've a track record of talking about books I never write, in Australia they think I'm about to write a book about Jane Austen. Something I said at some festival. -- Kate Atkinson
No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships. -- Sophie Hannah
I'm not a big Austen reader. I wouldn't say I dislike her, but if I had to choose between her and Eliot to bring to a desert island, it would definitely be Eliot. -- Elizabeth Gilbert
[ Lady Susan novel by Jane Austen is] extremely difficult to adapt. I worked on it for years, for, like, ten years, before I started showing it to people. This was my back-burner project. -- Whit Stillman
I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read. -- Cathleen Schine
Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story! -- Colm Toibin
There are some writers who wrote too much. There are others who wrote enough. There are yet others who wrote nothing like enough to satisfy their admirers, and Jane Austen is certainly one of these. -- Margaret Drabble
But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it. -- Seth Grahame-Smith
Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.' -- Lauren Willig
... I have discovered that our great favorite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman ... with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers ... -- Mary Russell Mitford
Jane Austen, much in advance of her day, was a mistress of the use of the dialogue. She used it as dialogue should be used-to advance the story; not only to show the characters, but to advance. -- Elizabeth Bowen
That's the attraction of the conference circuit: it's a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else's expense. Write a paper and see the world! I'm Jane Austen - fly me! -- David Lodge
I've done my share of period stuff. I'm not sure why, but people say I have a period face. The bread and butter of British TV is Jane Austen adaptations and bridges and bonnets and boats and horses. -- Tom Hiddleston
I read "Pride and Prejudice" [by Jane Austen]. I was gobsmacked by it - it's so funny and so modern. Unbelievable. You don't expect funny to come through after 200 years - humor doesn't transcend decades, let alone centuries. -- Julie Walters
She doesn't do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen's point - Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army. -- Susanna Clarke
When I came to England it wasn't what it is now, then the black people were very rarely strong. I had a personal shock because England wasn't what I expected it to be... where people lived like Jane Austen. -- Buchi Emecheta
Growing up, I mostly read comic books and sci-fi. Then I discovered the book 'Jane Eyre' by Jane Austen. It introduced me to the world of romance, which I have since never left. Also, the world of the first-person narrative. -- Meg Cabot
[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond. -- Rebecca West
As blue chips turn into penny stocks, Wall Street seems less like a symbol of America's macho capitalism and more like that famous Jane Austen character Mrs. Bennet, a flibbertigibbet always anxious about getting richer and her 'poor nerves.' -- Maureen Dowd
The great thing about Jane Austen - the reason we're all still obsessed with her - is that she gets inside a woman's mind and she taps into our fantasies of wanting to be accepted and loved for who we are. -- Jennifer Coolidge
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book. -- Simon Schama
It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous. -- Mona Simpson
If you look at my personal library, you will notice that it ranges from Henry James to Steig Larsson, from Margaret Atwood to Max Hastings. There's Jane Austen and Tom Perrotta and volumes of letters from Civil War privates. It's pretty eclectic. -- Chris Bohjalian
I'm totally in love with Jane Austen and have always been in love with Jane Austen. I did my dissertation at university on black people in eighteenth-century Britain - so I'd love to do a Jane Austen-esque film but with black people. -- Naomie Harris
Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable. -- Julian Barnes
It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of woman's life is that ... -- Virginia Woolf
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will. -- Terry Eagleton
Couples are really funny, because if they are together, they can fight and do fun things together. In Jane Austen books, marriage is the end of the story, but I actually think a really funny couple could be a fun thing to watch. -- Mindy Kaling
I did a cover for 'Rolling Stone' the other day and it was a kind of crazy lack of outfit. I thought, 'Oh, Lord. I'm never going to be Jane Austen in a film now!' 'Cause that's what I'd really like to do. -- Rose McGowan
I think I made a mistake with [Jane] Austen by reading all six in a row. There are similarities to the plots so by the time I got to the last one I could anticipate what was happening too easily. But her characterizations are amazing. -- Stephen Dobyns
You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories. -- Mariella Frostrup
When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so. -- Mark Twain
Think of anybody - Dostoevsky or Jane Austen - [their work] was always something that now we would call political. So I don't see those separations too much, between what is artistic and what is political. Maybe in painting... no, I don't even believe that. -- Toni Morrison
With impeccable prose, dry wit, and uncommon wisdom, Ted Thompson brings to life one family's painful disappointments and powerful resilience. The Land of Steady Habits combines Austen's shrewd mastery of domestic economics with Updike's compassion for the melancholy commuter to make something elegant, fresh, and brilliant. -- Maggie Shipstead
She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading. -- E. M. Delafield
People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life. -- Azar Nafisi
I always say that the characters in Jane Austen's original books are rather like zombies because they live in this bubble of immense wealth and privilege and no matter what's going on around them they have a singular purpose to maintain their rank and to impress others. -- Seth Grahame-Smith
Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces. -- Roger Ebert
[Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven. -- Denis Dutton
I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse. -- Amy Bloom
For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett's] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom. -- Rebecca Solnit
I was in Los Angeles making 'Dead Again' and the producer, Lindsay Doran , asked me if I'd be interested in adapting this book, .. Austen is my favorite author and I thought, 'Well, of course, I'd be very interested, but I don't know how. I don't know where to start, A, writing a screenplay and B, sort of adapting it from a great novel. -- Emma Thompson
They're always such alive females. And also, all those love stories - no man in Austen has ever fallen in love with a female heroine because she's pretty or beautiful or has long, blonde hair. They fall in love with them because of who they are, because of their vibrancy and their intelligence and if only we were teaching that a bit more in schools. -- Anna Maxwell Martin
If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind. -- Sebastian Faulks
What I'd love to do would be to bring a person from the past to me. In that case I'd pick Jane Austen, because I'd like to know what really made her tick. It's my opinion that she was inhibited by her family and a desire to do the right thing. Away from all that, I believe she'd show new facets and enjoy the adventure. -- Jo Beverley

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