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My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
I did a cover for 'Rolling Stone' the other day and it was a kind of crazy lack of outfit. I thought, 'Oh, Lord. I'm never going to be Jane Austen in a film now!' 'Cause that's what I'd really like to do.
Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.
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 imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a costume drama out of it. There's no place for it to go except trapped inside its little book.
Look at Jane Austen. Her characters derive in a reasonably straight line from fairy tales.
You only need to look at Jane Austen to see how crossed wires can become a defining aspect of romantic life. Then again, if the course of true love ran more smoothly, it would have a terribly detrimental effect on our cache of love stories.
I'm totally in love with Jane Austen and have always been in love with Jane Austen. I did my dissertation at university on black people in eighteenth-century Britain - so I'd love to do a Jane Austen-esque film but with black people.
