Top 160 Jane Quotes

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.

‘Bridgerton’ is something a bit like if Jane Austen met Gossip Girl’ and maybe like 45 Shades of Grey.’

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.

It was only when I saw films in my early 20s by Jane Campion, Mira Nair, Sally Potter and Kathryn Bigelow, I started to think, ‘Oh, it’s possible.’ I dared to suggest that I wanted to train to be a film director.

When Goldie Hawn wrote her memoirs, no one said Goldie Hawn was snitching. When Jane Fonda wrote her memoirs, no one said Jane Fonda was snitching.

When I filmed ‘Live And Let Die’ with Jane Seymour, I kept my socks on in bed, as it was such a cold set.

‘Jane Eyre’ was one of those films that I was familiar with as a kid, and I always enjoyed the story.

Jane Austen is very amusing.

A lot of the songs in ‘See Jane Sing!’ are pulled straight from the kitchen table and my parents harmonizing together.

No, I chose the name Jane Seymour because I was doing my first film, ‘Oh! What a Lovely War,’ and one of the top agents in England spotted me dancing in the chorus. I was a singer and dancer in that movie with Maggie Smith, um, and he told me he couldn’t sell me as Joyce Penelope Willomena Frankenburger.

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading seasons. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is ‘ghost story’ time, while Jane Austen and P. G. Wodehouse pretty much own April and May.

Words change over time. ‘Condescending,’ for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen’s world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.

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.

Losing Jane was tragic and I thought I’d never get married again, or have more children, or would even ever want to.

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

I’m like Jane Austen – I work on the corner of the dining table.

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.

I think it’s about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.

I am devastated by the loss of my beautiful wife Jane. She was my best friend.

The family is the focal point of our existence. And up until Jane and Lucy’s death, there were always 16 of us together for Christmas.

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.

I once rented the Georgian town house that Jane Austen lived in down by the Holburne Museum – so I lived in Jane Austen’s house, and slept in Jane Austen’s bedroom. You can walk along these Georgian streets and it’s like you’re in a Jane Austen period drama.

Well, every now and then I would hear the preposterous notion that that Jane Pauley sounds like Barbara Walters. Like I could if I tried?

You’re never safe in ‘Jane the Virgin;’ that’s what I’ll say. You’re never safe on a telenovela, that’s for darn sure, and you’re never safe on ‘Jane the Virgin.’

I grew up watching period dramas, as we all did in the 1980s and ’90s – endless adaptations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens – and I loved them. But I never saw anyone like me in them, so I decided to find a story to erode the excuses for me not doing one.

From an early age, I was very interested in all things fashion… and the change from tomboy to ultrafeminine glamour in old films. There was a Doris Day film I loved: ‘Calamity Jane.’

I grew up on Jane Austen novels and was a massive literature fanatic when I was a kid – I read everything I could get my hands on.

I was born and brought up in Liverpool with my clever little sister Jemma, who is 14 and wants to be a vet. My mum Jane is an administrator and my dad Peter is a taxi driver.

Life’s short, so if you’re going to spend months doing something, it’s gotta be pretty special… But I’m very happy to enter my Baby Jane years, and hopefully segue into the Ruth Gordon years.

When I was in my twenties, I strongly identified with Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ – her human failings mixed with a desire to do good.

For me, the most exciting thing is that Jane Campion is a woman we can all really look up to. She doesn’t have the body of work that some other directors do – no woman director does – but her work is so consistently original, wonderful, masterful.

I’m a Jane Austen/Jane Eyre kind of girl.

‘Pride and Prejudice’ – perhaps more than any other Jane Austen book – is engrained in our literary consciousness.

I could never understand the attraction of Bette Davis. I always preferred Jane Russell.

I’m the ayatollah of the Jane Austen fan base! I want to lead the fan base, not be attacked and devoured by the fan base.

I love ‘Jane Eyre,’ and I love the Bronte sisters. I actually didn’t read any of them until I was in college, so I don’t have quite the same connection with them that I think a lot of women do.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with ‘Loony Tunes’), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say ‘Jane Eyre’ by Charlotte Bronte.

I used the name Jane Roe because I didn’t want my personal name to be involved in it.

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.

I was in band that played mostly covers for a while, and the bands that we would cover were, like, the alternative rock bands of that day: we did a Jane’s Addiction song and a Faith No More song. All the kind of alternative radio of that time, the late ’80s, basically.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

I identify entirely with Jane Austen’s point of view, on everything.

I was really glad to meet Jane Clark because it did give me an insight. I couldn’t imagine what kind of woman she was. I was hugely impressed by her energy, straightforward nature and enthusiasm for life.

Jane Lynch is the nicest person I’ve ever worked with.

When my career started on daytime soaps, those characters usually didn’t have much depth to them. The main goal was to memorize my lines in order to film efficiently the next day. But with ‘Jane The Virgin,’ the writing is strong, and everything is intentional.

I’ve been having a 20-plus year conversation with black women, starting with ‘Girlfriends,’ moving through ‘The Game,’ ‘Being Mary Jane,’ even ‘Sparkle.’

I’ve never had a study in my life. I’m like Jane Austen – I work on the corner of the dining table.

My grandmother is bilingual, but she preferred to speak Spanish at home, so she would speak to us in Spanish, and everyone responded in English, sort of like what happens on ‘Jane.’

The web is just another stunning point in the two-hundred-thousand-year history of human beings on earth. The taming of fire; the discovery of penicillin; the publication of ‘Jane Eyre’ – add anything you like.

I wish I had gone to Cannes with a film, but I had gone there for L’Oreal Pakistan. I cannot tell you the people that I was around, from Helen Mirren to Jane Fonda. It was a proud moment on the red carpet when they announced my name and said ‘Mahira Khan from Pakistan.’

I would go in the university stacks and pull out books like ‘Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II’ when I was 12 or something, and I’d spend hours reading about the engines in some of those planes.

I was influenced by big, strong voices – writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Jane Bowles; gay writers like Ed White, Michael Cunningham, Allen Hollinghurst; and contemporary lesbian writers, like Dorothy Allison.

I love ‘Modern Family.’ And I love ‘Glee’ – the singing, the music – Jane Lynch just kills me.

Fortunately… ‘With Fi and Jane’ features BBC veterans Fi Glover and Jane Garvey sitting in the BBC cafe, nattering about whatever interests them.

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.

I do want to write about Jane Whitefield again, but only when I have a good enough idea – something I’ve figured out about her that’s news and that’s worth a reader’s time.

I love to direct my daughter, and act with her, and we both want to work with Jane again.

I learned so much from Jane Lynch. She was the funniest and most talented person. She taught me so much about being a performer.

Meeting Perry Farrel was kind of cool. He’s such an icon, and I was such a fan of Jane’s Addiction.

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.’

When I was a teenager, I used to love the Bronte books, ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Jane Eyre.’ In those books, the women do usually manage to heal the men, but in life, I’ve found it’s often the woman gets wounded. Instead of healing a man, she gets affected by his cruelty.

I give everything to my work, and I like complex roles, characters that aren’t obvious. I’ve been very lucky so far, and I’m dreaming of working with directors like Jane Campion, Susanne Bier and the Dardennes. But the gods will decide.

I learned how to play guitar by playing along to Jane’s Addiction records and Smashing Pumpkins records, things you can totally hear if you listen to my guitar.

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.

I was born in 1937, in Yakima, Washington, the oldest child of Robert Emerson Lucas and Jane Templeton Lucas. My sister Jenepher was born in 1939 and my brother Peter in 1940. My parents had moved to Yakima from Seattle to open a small restaurant, The Lucas Ice Creamery.

Sweet Jane’ is my favorite song by Lou Reed the writer, at least the Velvet Underground Lou Reed.

When I moved to New York, I was dead broke and lost my mind, and my girlfriend dumped me and was with some banker making money. I wandered by Jane Curtin’s house, and she’s like, ‘Come in here, dear. I’ll make you lunch. Tell me, what’s going on in your life?’

To be sandwiched between Jane Curtin and Bob Newhart for a couple weeks is phenomenal.

Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It’s not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.

I’m kind of a mash-up of taste – Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro.

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as ‘first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don’t fit, into their social worlds.’

I do hope to bring Jane Whitefield back before too long.

‘Sin Nombre’ was almost like the adolescent version of ‘Jane Eyre.’ ‘Jane Eyre’ sort of picks up where ‘Sin Nombre’ ends. It’s about this girl who starts off on her own at her lowest point of despair, and she figures out how she got there.

If you look at Jane Fonda’s first tape, it’s like, ‘How to injure yourself to music.’

Everyone has this idea of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin: the woman being pretty and prancing around while the guy writes all the songs.

When I did ‘Don’t Look Back,’ I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting ‘Jane.’

I grew up with ‘Jane Eyre,’ reading it at school, and it’s one of those, I think, for a lot of women, a lot of girls, it’s the iconic story and so many girls relate to Jane Eyre and her character.

Jane’s Addiction has only put out new music when our hearts were in and when we had something to say creatively.

On ‘Being Mary Jane,’ I learned to embrace sex symbol.

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.

I can always go back to Jane Austen. ‘Mansfield Park’ is full of wise aphorisms and relevant observations of people.

I loved reading ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and ‘Little Women’ and Jane Austen. Those were times when people really did have only one true love in their life.

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.

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.

When I had the wonderful occasion to play a goofball, Jane, in ‘Coupling,’ it was definitely an homage to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who I just think is a genius.

As Annie Proulx is to Wyoming, so is Jane Candia Coleman to Arizona.

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.

I love that topic, the whole relationship thing, and I think that’s why I love all this stuff, the Jane Austen stuff.

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.

I’m an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line – it’s George Eliot, it’s Dickens, it’s Dr. Johnson, it’s Jane Austen.

Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.

I do sometimes joke that I’m Tarzan and Ben’s Jane when it comes to dealing with spiders or if there’s dead things in the garden.

I first became aware of Gina Rodriguez when she was just starting out starring on ‘Jane the Virgin,’ and a friend sent me an article in which she mentioned me.

Jane Lynch is incredibly quick-witted, very intelligent, and extremely humorous. Also, on top of that all, just a very wonderful, warm, kind person. She’s definitely someone to look up to.

I write contemporary rock with Jane’s. And I also write house music with people like Kascade.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

You would never argue about a straight girl playing a lesbian. Everybody still watched ‘The L Word.’ I feel like we have such great role models, like Jane Lynch and Jodie Foster and all these people that you don’t even think about.

Since There are so many questions about what the president was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda denouncing America’s racist war in Vietnam?

We asked Jane Fonda if she would like to meet American pilots in Hanoi, but she refused, she didn’t want to.

Say what you want about Maroon 5 not making music like the kind found on ‘Songs About Jane,’ the fact remains that they know how to write a really good pop song that highlights lead singer Adam Levine’s falsetto.

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.

I’ve never got on very well with Jane Austen.

‘Calamity Jane’ inspired me to be a performer. I still want to be her.

I really needed a show like ‘Jane’ when I was growing up, so being able to portray a positive Latina character means a lot to me because I feel like it’s helping me to contribute to someone’s dreams.

‘Pride and Prejudice’ is often compared to ‘Cinderella,’ but Jane Austen’s real ‘Cinderella’ tale is ‘Mansfield Park.’

I used to dress like Roger Taylor when I was ten because I thought he was cool. In high school, I used to dress like Stephen Perkins from Jane’s Addiction because I thought he was cool. You just want to be those guys when you’re that age.

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

‘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.

One of the things I love best about Marvel is the ‘What If?’ factor; being able to just say, ‘Today we’re going to explore a world where Magneto and Emma never gave back the X-Men. Or a world where Mary Jane shares Peter’s powers.’ So being able to do that is just super exciting.

When I’m an old lady, I’m going to have my pick of the young men. They’ll be like, ‘She’s Miss Mary Jane!’ The young boys will think I’m a hot old lady.

I adore Jane Lynch, so just to get the opportunity to work with her was phenomenal.

We weren’t radical chic. Jane Fonda embarrassed me. We belonged to no political parties. Basically, we were vaudevillians.

One of the reasons we all still read Jane Austen is because her books are about universal things which still matter today – love, money, family. They haven’t gone out of fashion, so it’s not throwing the baby out with the bathwater to rework her in a contemporary style.

Picture books, while less in word count, are certainly not less important. There are unbelievably skillful authors writing in this vein. Authors like Jane O’Connor and Jon Scieszka.

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.

I was fed up with being just plain Jane.

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.

Part of me just wants ‘Jane’ magazine back, and ‘Sassy,’ too.

I’d just as soon not get into a discussion about Jane and her politics. I’d just as soon stick to what we’re here for, the picture.

Jane Campion is a tough director.

I remember, when I was a teenager, ‘Pride And Prejudice’ came out. We hadn’t had a period drama for ages, and were all glued to it, and for the next three years, Jane Austen series were being made.

‘Being Mary Jane,’ I really want everybody to see what we’ve done. I’ve never watched a project that I’ve worked and thought, ‘Damn that’s really good. It’s so juicy, and it’s hit after hit.’

NBC President Fred Silverman told me he would change my life, and proceeded to offer me a five to seven-year contract to replace Jane Pauley as co-host of ‘The Today Show.’

When I was young, all the books were about a Mary Jane and the football player and the prom and ending up with the quiet guy and making your mom happy.

Jane Austen’s characters for women are always very strong, opinionated and elegantly written, so they’re always great for an actress to have a chance to do.

With ‘Sin Nombre,’ there are parts that I wish were longer. And with ‘Jane Eyre’ especially, there were parts that I had to compress that I thought it would have been really nice to spend more time with – to spend with the characters.

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the ’60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

‘Pride And Prejudice’ takes place in a similar period to ‘Vanity Fair,’ and yet there’s a huge difference between Jane Austen and Thackeray.

You can be interested in a Jane Smiley novel whether or not anyone says a word. She enters into her characters’ thoughts with great understanding and depth.

There is almost a 60-year age difference between Miley Cyrus and Jane Fonda, and one day I trained them both. I would say I trained Jane in her 70s even harder than I did Miley, who’s a teenager. I think, as you become older, it’s not about working harder: it’s about working smarter.

There’s such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot… Jane Austen… that’s all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn’t ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

Am I overjoyed when somebody says, ‘Oh, we’re going to do another Jane Austen?’ No – because there’s never anything in it for me.

I remember when I was trying to do ‘Metropolitan,’ in breaks I would read a page of two of Jane Austen as a palate-cleanser.

The Dick, Jane, and Spot primers have gone to that bookshelf in the sky. I have, in some ways, a tender feeling toward them, so I think it’s for the best.

How can a guy climb trees, say Me Tarzan, You Jane, and make a million?

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.

I think that there is not really a difference between a ‘Peanuts’ and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the ‘Peanuts’ – it’s at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

To me, the thing that has always ruined Jane Fonda is her voice.

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.

Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.

Before novels written by women were relegated to their own ‘genre,’ I was introduced to Jane Smiley by a dear professor who raised my awareness of what female authors were bringing to the table of contemporary fiction.

I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public, being sworn in as the first female president of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pill box hat and matching coat.

The script that I fell in love with and adored was ‘Jane the Virgin’… but every line in the pilot was essentially, ‘Why did you keep my daughter a secret all of these years?’ I didn’t know any direction my character was going – was it going to be a dramatic character, a comedic character? – I didn’t know.

‘Clueless’ is an adaptation of ‘Emma’ by Jane Austen. It works either way: if you know the book and if you don’t.

When Jane and I spoke out, people thought, What ungrateful children those two kids are to be that nasty about their father.

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.

I really started to enjoy Instagram more recently because it’s something that shows people what I’m doing and what I’m going through, but it’s so simple. I don’t have to come up with something witty; it’s just a funny photo, and you can be as artistic or as plain Jane as you want.

In December of 2001, after September 11th, my wife, Jane Rosenthal, and Robert DeNiro asked me if I would help them create the Tribeca Film Festival. The idea was to revitalize lower Manhattan. We would show films on piers, in high schools. It was all about the community. We wanted it to be accessible to everybody.

I think Jane Fonda is to be admired for her stands.

I would say anything is possible on ‘Jane the Virgin.’

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

My theory in the ’90s was that I didn’t want to take a Jane Austen book I loved and reduce it to a 90-minute movie. The Emma Thompson-Ang Lee ‘Sense and Sensibility’ was beautiful, but other ones, I didn’t think justice was being done. It’s not a slam dunk to adapt these books.

Crazy Jane is a complex individual who always has a lot brewing. She tries to hold things together on the surface, which is something that we all try to do. She uses these different personalities to try to cope with life.

I love so many directors. I love David O. Russell. I love David Fincher, I love Alexander Payne and Jane Campion and my aunt. Spike Jonze. There are just so many amazing directors.

The reason why Three Mile Island makes such a big impact is because of a Jane Fonda movie called ‘The China Syndrome.’

You don’t think that mean people can be funny, and Jane Lynch is the epitome of that. If there could be, like, a gay version of ‘Mean Girls,’ I’d totally be in it.

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.

I was invited to do an all-female improv festival in Portland called All Jane, No Dick. The person running it asked me if I had a female improv team, and I just said yes and then figured out who I would want to bring with me. We had such a fun show together that we decided that we should keep doing it.

Jane, Henry VIII’s third wife, wasn’t present at her son’s christening, as ritual dictated she had to spend another month in bed. From her chamber she could have looked down on the christening procession below, and must have felt great pride.

Just as Bowie, Zeppelin, etc., became rock stars by remaking themselves in the image of the California girls, the Go-Gos became rock stars by pretending to be the Buzzcocks and the Sex Pistols. Jane Wiedlin always said her biggest influence was growing up in L.A. as a Bowie girl.