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I identify entirely with Jane Austen's point of view, on everything.

Jane Austen is very amusing.

Jane Austen was an extraordinary woman; to actually be able to survive as a novelist in those days - unmarried - was just unheard of.

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.

I've been fortunate in that I never actually read any Jane Austen until I was thirty, thus sparing myself several decades of the unhappiness of having no new Jane Austen novels to read.

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.

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

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

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.

I don't think there's anything cliche feminine about Jane Austen. And, anyway, her earliest champions were Sir Walter Scott and the Prince Regent.