Susanna Clarke Quotes

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

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

'Pride And Prejudice' takes place in a similar period to 'Vanity Fair,' and yet there's a huge difference between Jane Austen and Thackeray.

There isn't a book that has changed me, but I have favourites such as 'Pride and Prejudice' which I often re-read.

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

I must confess that in my teens and twenties, I loved 'Mansfield Park' rather in spite of Fanny than because of her. Like Fanny's rich, sophisticated cousins, I didn't really get her.

Jane Austen's characters for women are always very strong, opinionated and elegantly written, so they're always great for an actress to have a chance to do.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

I'm obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can't help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I'm not sure it is now.

I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.

The book says, 'Vanity Fair - a story without a hero.' Becky is effectively the protagonist, the hero we follow. But she is flawed. Becky is a subject of her own time.

When you're reading a novel, I think the reason you care about how any given plot turns out is that you take it as a data point in the big story of how the world works. Does such-and-such a kind of guy get the girl in the end? Does adultery ever bring happiness? How do winners become winners?

I've never read 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,' although I certainly know what that is. And what I love about that concept is as much as it's a zombie story, it's also 'Pride and Prejudice.'

'Suttree' is a fat one, a book with rude, startling power and a flood of talk. Much of it takes place on the Tennessee River, and Cormac McCarthy, who has written 'The Orchard Keeper' and other novels, gives us a sense of river life that reads like a doomed 'Huckleberry Finn.'

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

Things are not quite what they seem always. Don't start me on class, otherwise you'll get a four-hour lecture.

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.

A film must have two elements - it must deal with the real world and show how it could be made better.

Once, in a magazine interview, I said the difference between shoe ladies and bag ladies is that shoe ladies are just a bit classier. Finished! That started World War III among all the women I knew. I only meant that shoes do more for your look and body than bags do!

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

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.

The contemporary crime novel is, at its best, a novel of character. That's where the suspense comes from.

One of the things I really like about Victorian novels is the close anatomisation of character. People's gestures and mannerisms and the quality of their thought is very closely identified and analysed.

But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

'Emma' is my favorite Jane Austen novel - one of my favorite novels period; a novel about intelligence outsmarting itself, about a complicated, nuanced, irresistible heroine who does everything wrong.