Whit Stillman Quotes

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.

I'm a big reader, so when I was in 'Pride and Prejudice,' or, like, in Poirots and Marples, those are all books that I loved, and so it was really exciting for me to inhabit characters from literature that I knew and recognized.

Well, as a kid I did not get Shakespeare. I just never understood it.

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.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

One of the reasons we all still read Jane Austen is because her books are about universal things which still matter today - love, money, family. They haven't gone out of fashion, so it's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater to rework her in a contemporary style.

I sort of half read Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.' It was assigned in 10th grade, and I just couldn't get into it. About seven years later, I rediscovered Hardy and consumed four of his novels in a row.

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 see 'Eligible' as a homage, and I see 'Pride and Prejudice' as a perfect book. You can dispute whether this project is a good idea, but you can't dispute my fondness for the novel.

Shakespeare didn't work at all for me.

I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.

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.

I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand because his technique stunned me.

Attending a book group is always a salutary experience for a writer. There's no guarantee that the people there will have enjoyed your book, and, as anyone who has taken part in a book group will know, half the fun is in ripping a book you haven't liked to shreds.

I really liked English literature, a subject I did really well at.

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

I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

Jane Austen is one of my all-time favourites.

From my earliest days, reading was my passion, and at Cambridge, where I studied English literature, my intellectual life deepened and grew.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

I love English and literature.

I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.

When I was in grad school, I had to admit I hadn't read Toni Morrison. My teacher, the novelist Colum McCann, said I had to. I read 'Beloved' and 'Song of Solomon.' Pretty incredible.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.