Antonia Fraser Quotes

A trio of reputations lie at the heart of Henry James's 'The Portrait of a Lady.'

I've never managed to get very far with Henry James.

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

I am very fond of Edith Wharton. She's quite high brow but also a great storyteller. My favorite is 'The House of Mirth.' I also like 'The Reef.'

I love Victorian novels, the way they capture the nuances of the human condition.

'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'

Some people might be surprised that 'Rambo's creator has a doctorate in American literature. One of my influences is Henry James, whose major theme is awareness. Whether I'm writing about military personnel, law enforcement, or De Quincey, the persistent theme is paying attention in a hostile world.

When I love a novel I've read, I want to reread it - in part, to see how it was constructed.

Let me now praise the American writer James Dickey. In 1970, his novel 'Deliverance' was published. I found it to be 278 pages that approached perfection. Its tightness of construction and assuredness of style reminded me of 'The Great Gatsby.'

What surprised me about 'The Casual Vacancy' was not just how good it was, but the particular way in which it was good.

My wife read Narc as well and was really into it.

I've recently rediscovered Anthony Trollope. I used to read him back in college, and a friend turned me on to a whole new series of his work, 'The Palliser Series.' It's a series of seven or eight books.

I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

I think I learned discipline on 'Jane Eyre.' Charlotte Bronte's dialogue, the intellectual duel between Rochester and Jane Eyre's character, is so compelling that you didn't have to do much with the placement of cameras.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

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

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since.

'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides left me both moved and, at times, laughing out loud in delight.

I grew up reading 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' - girly kind of books.

I picked up my college copy of 'The Great Gatsby' in an attempt to recover from the movie and was interested to find out what I'd underlined. The answer was basically: everything.

When I read 'Room,' I absolutely loved it, and I thought I knew how to make it.

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 recently read a collection of stories called 'Boondock Kollage,' by Regina Bradley. The stories follow multiple characters through the South, through the past and present. I loved reading that book: the first time I read the opening story, I was breathless and incoherent.

I can only remember two books from college that moved me: E.M. Forster's 'Howards End' and F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby.'