Austen Quotes - Page 4

• 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

  Novelists, Able, Extraordinary

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• I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.

  A. N. Wilson

  Dining, Tables, Jane

  "AN Wilson: 'Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow'". Interview with William Skidelsky, www.theguardian.com. April 21, 2012.

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• 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

  Growing Up, Book, Romance

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• 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

  Book, Writing, People

  "B is for bestseller" by Mark Haddon, www.theguardian.com. April 11, 2004.

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• 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

  Past, Magic, Lines

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• Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

  Virginia Woolf

  Thinking, Years, Voice

  Virginia Woolf (1989). “A Room of One's Own”, p.79, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I would say to that is, we tend to think of historical periods and historical mores as ending a lot more concretely than they do. Like, in an Austen novel, there are lots of reasons - cultural, moral, religious - why the characters don't have sex during courtship. Maybe, even though those reasons have kind of expired, historically, they're still around in some sense.

  Elif Batuman

  Religious, Sex, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• 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

  Sex, Thinking, Fiction

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.614, Wordsworth Editions

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• 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

  Pride, Years, Prejudice

  Source: www.digitalspy.com

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• Jane Austen is the feminine Peter Pan of letters. She never grew up.

  George Sampson

  Letters, Feminine, Grew Up

  "12 Sick Burns From People Who Didn’t Get The Jane Austen Hype" by Sara Boboltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 13, 2015.

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• To Jane Austen, every fool is a treasure trove.

  Mason Cooley

  Treasure, Fool, Jane

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• [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

  Nice, People, Pieces

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• Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.

  Mark Twain

  Heaven, Bartender, Novel

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• 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

  Literature, English Literature, Jane

  Source: collider.com

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• I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

  Anne Stevenson

  Literature, Loyal, Schubert

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• And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

  Andrew Clements

  Clever, Giving, Musical

  Andrew Clements (2008). “Things Hoped For”, p.77, Penguin

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• 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

  Book, People, Like Her

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• 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

  Book, Character, Zombie

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• Pride and Prejudice' - perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book - is engrained in our literary consciousness.

  Seth Grahame-Smith

  Book, Pride, Prejudice

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• I'm a Jane Austen/Jane Eyre kind of girl.

  Maggie Grace

  Girl, Kind, Jane

  "Maggie Grace Talks LOCKOUT, TWILIGHT, TAKEN 2, DECODING ANNIE PARKER, and More". Interview, collider.com. April 10, 2012.

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• 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

  Strong, Able, Emma

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• 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

  Character, Thinking, Stories

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• 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

  Real, Believe, Book

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• 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

  Writing, Negativity, Shapes

  Edward Bond (2014). “Bond Plays: 2: Lear; The Sea; Narrow Road to the Deep North; Black Mass; Passion”, p.3, A&C Black

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• 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

  Art, Years, Ducks

  "A puritan at play" by Terry Eagleton, www.theguardian.com. March 15, 2008.

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