Top 193 Austen Quotes & Sayings

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

If there was a Jane Austen camp, I would go, no question.

I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen. My fatuous expression, and airs of personal immunity-how ill they sit on the face, say,of a Stevensonian! But Jane Austen is so different. She is my favourite author! I read and reread, the mouth open and the mind closed. Shut up in measureless content, I greet her by the name of most kind hostess, while criticism slumbers.

I can talk about Jane Austen until the cows come home.

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

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.

...in other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama Interview - March 1964

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.

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

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

Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating

And there's even a lord named Lord Dashwood [like the characters in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility]. It's very steeped in Austen. It's been used in many films, but not in its entirety and we shot the inside and the outside and used every nook and cranny. The inside is very gaudy. It's a little naughty inside. There's a lot of portraiture.

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

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.

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 am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.

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

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.

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.

I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.

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

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.

One of the less vaunted joys of Austen is that she is one of the greatest writers in the English language who also happened to write witty romance novels. Women enjoy the love stories in Austen the same way men read Hemingway for the hunting and fishing: it provides guiltless pleasure.

One doesn't read Jane Austen; one re-reads Jane Austen.

I actually didn't like Jane Austen. I was more into the Brontes. They were so wild and passionate. I thought there was something a bit tame about Austen.

Miss Austen had shown the infinite possibilities of ordinary and present things for the novelist.

Each of us has a private Austen.

Jane Austen is one of my all-time favourites.

Updike's style is an exquisite blend of Melville and Austen: reading him is like cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors.

I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.

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

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

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

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

As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.

It was the marriage that was important; Jane Austen rarely even bothered to write about the wedding.

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

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.'

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

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

Jane Austen we know never let two men converse alone in any novel because what they said would be unknown to her.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

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.

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.

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare.

It was like being in a Jane Austen novel, but one with far less clothing.

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

I mean, I knew of Jane Austen's work, and I guess I'm a fan at a distance insofar as from a literary point of view, it's beautifully written.

Jane Austen is very amusing.

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

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

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

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

'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 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.

The latest gorgeous entry in the Belknap Press' growing library of annotated Jane Austen novels arrives, this time the mighty Emma under the exactingly careful guidance of Bharat Tandon of the University of East Anglia. Belknap has once again done its end of the job superbly: the book is a physical treat-luxuriantly over-sized, heavy with quality paper and solid binding, decked out in a beautiful cover and dozens of well-chosen illustrations throughout. This is one of the prettiest Jane Austen volumes available in bookstoresthis season.

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

To Jane Austen, every fool is a treasure trove.

Once I started writing the screenplay of 'Bride & Prejudice,' I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous birth.