Jane Austen Quotes

If you're going to have more than one person read your book, they're going to have totally different opinions and responses. No person - no two people - read the same book.

Everyone reads a different book. That's what's interesting. Everyone sees a different film, as well. We bring our past lives to whatever work of art we're experiencing at that moment, and that's what makes it interesting. It's not mathematics. There are different answers for different people.

I think... if it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts.

Different people, in good faith, can look at the same fact and interpret it differently. But that's where an interesting conversation begins.

Everyone's going to have their own experience and perspective on everything.

My parents saw certain things differently than other people.

The character I play has all these revolutionary ideas. I think the classic thing is that majority people who are criticising it probably have never read the books, and need to. And I'm sure that the Catholic Church, which is being directed as you know, can handle it.

I think it's difficult to be honest about certain aspects of my work without acknowledging that I have experienced or felt or questioned certain of the themes in the books.

My husband [Julius Tennon] and I started a production company. We've already optioned a book and some scripts to do exactly that, to create more complicated, multi-faceted roles for African-Americans, especially African-American females. I think it's important.

I think two different people can read one of my books and come away with completely different opinions on the subject. I hope they just read from the beginning to the end and be made to think about the subject. Then they can come to their own conclusions.

...thinking as he had thought before and would think again and as every other man has thought: how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.

I can't say that you should extract this or that value from my books explicitly. They are up for interpretation. In terms of the obligation, I think we're all individuals on this planet, trying to scratch our way through the day, and if you're writing a book exposing atrocities in Rwanda or writing a murder mystery set in a mountain village, I think both ways of spending you time are valid and both books are probably fine to read.

I'm often a little perplexed, when I read a review of a book, by the quotes that are pulled out as evidence of excellent prose. I don't think great novels are necessarily composed of great prose, or that there's a correlation between beautiful prose and the quality of a work of fiction. A really good, interesting novel will often let a little ugliness get into its words - to create a certain effect, to leave the reader with a certain sense of disorientation.

I often find that people's reactions to the show say way more about them than they do about the show itself. I think that's because a lot of it happens between the lines.

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

Of which beauty will you speak? There are many: there are a thousand: there is one for every look, for every spirit, adapted to each taste, to each particular constitution.

Certainly the details of our life are unique. Spending time thinking of how I am different from someone else, however, does not tend to be very productive.

I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.

I am prepared to accept from others their own version of reality. I think it is a basic freedom really, to create one's own reality from whatever truths are available.

Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can't see.

I don't think my book is any more shocking than if I went out right now and brought back your local newspaper and found a story that happened around here yesterday or the day before that's just as shocking as anything in my book.

Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.