Top 55 Austen Quotes

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.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

People love Jane Austen, even though those books are absurd to us, because we like the clarity of it: we can see very clearly what Elizabeth Bennett has to overcome, what she has to deal with.

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

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

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.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn’t like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read ‘Northanger Abbey’ sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn’t read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

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

Growing up in the English countryside, I feel like I’m in a Jane Austen novel when I walk around. I just feel comfortable and confident in those surroundings.

‘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.

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.

Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen’s wonderful – this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.

Jane Austen is very amusing.

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

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.

With Eric Rohmer – as with Mozart, Austen, James, and Proust – we need to remember that art is seldom about life, or not quite about life. Art is about discovery and design and reasoning with chaos.

I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things.

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.

I tell stories. I kind of stumbled on that by trying to combine Jane Austen and magic.

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

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

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.

It seems the more I play Jane Austen, the more poetic my writing becomes. The other day, I left a Post-it note for my husband that had the word ‘ergo’ on it. I gotta rein it in before I get all full out Madonnannoying.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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’ve always loved Jane Austen’s writing.

No good writer ever merely cheered us up. But there’s an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. Jane Austen was made of strong stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence’s taste and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis’s, but you would still not call her hellish.

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

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.

From a plot perspective, what I finally found for my touchstone was that I consider ‘Upside’ to be a loose telling of Jane Austen’s ‘Emma,’ or ‘Clueless.’

I do not regret the years I spent reading the traditional canon of white male writers in school. I do regret reading so little else there: Austen, George Eliot and occasionally Woolf, likewise Wright, Ellison, Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.

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’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.

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 don’t think there’s anything cliche feminine about Jane Austen. And, anyway, her earliest champions were Sir Walter Scott and the Prince Regent.

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

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.

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.

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

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.’

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.