Frances O'Connor Quotes

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.

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 quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

I just don't care about popular culture. It looks to me pointless and superficial. If I had free time I'd rather read a 19th century novel.

I was a lusty kid who loved Tennessee Williams.

'Finnegans Wake,' 'Alice and Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking Glass' live on my bedside table back home in London.

Am I a romantic? I've seen 'Wuthering Heights' ten times. I'm a romantic.

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

I kinda go for the Jane Eyre type of film. I am fascinated by classics.

Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them.

Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible.

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.

My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

I love ghost stories but kind of left them alone after my teens and came back to it after playing Heathcliff in 'Wuthering Heights' on the radio.

India is desperately romantic, utterly unashamed of its sentimentality, its generosity, its fierce pride and massive heart.

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell.

Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we're sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.

In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.

Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the 'mot juste.'

One of the books I remember reading when I was young and always thought would be a great role to play is Catherine in 'Wuthering Heights.' I like the classics.

I was a kid when I read Jane Eyre and fell in love with that universe. I didn't have the acumen to say the prose is old or the prose is too complex. I just fell in love with Jane's very lonely soul, much the same way I fell in love with Frankenstein's creature for the same reason. Those old souls exist in every decade in every century.

Ann Radcliffe was an early influence; I devoured her books while I should have been studying for my GCSEs.

I never show my books to Ricky. His writing is very different, and anyway, he's only read one novel in his life: 'The Catcher in the Rye.'