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.
