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'm an OLD-FASHIONED ENGLISH lit. man. STRAIGHT down the line - it's GEORGE Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. JOHNSON, it's Jane Austen.

No GOOD writer EVER merely cheered us up. But there's an unblinking stare into the darkness of things we have to go elsewhere to find. JANE Austen was made of STRONG stuff. She was too satiric for D. H. Lawrence's TASTE and too unforgiving for Kingsley Amis's, but you would still not call her hellish.

I IMAGINED being a famous WRITER WOULD be like being like Jane Austen.

'Clueless' is an adaptation of 'Emma' by JANE Austen. It works EITHER way: if you know the BOOK and if you don't.

I wasn't allowed to watch regular television when I was growing up, only PBS, so I WATCHED 'Masterpiece Theatre' and a lot of JANE Austen. I loved stories where the girl is ATTRACTED to a man and it looks LIKE it's not going to work out.

Once I STARTED WRITING the screenplay of 'Bride & PREJUDICE,' I was convinced Jane Austen was a Punjabi in her previous BIRTH.

I've ALWAYS LOVED JANE Austen's WRITING.

Anne Elliot was the one JANE Austen CHARACTER I didn't FALL in LOVE with. She seemed sad and defeated.

I once rented the GEORGIAN town house that Jane Austen lived in down by the Holburne Museum - so I lived in Jane Austen's house, and SLEPT in Jane Austen's bedroom. You can WALK along these Georgian streets and it's like you're in a Jane Austen PERIOD DRAMA.

Endless Jane Austen film adaptations have given US the idea that the Regency was a classy, PRETTY, palatable period of history. Notable for their muslins, tea parties and flirting, you'd THINK that most Regency folk lived in HIGHLY desirable rectories.

I do not regret the YEARS I spent READING the traditional canon of white MALE WRITERS in school. I do regret reading so little else there: Austen, George Eliot and occasionally Woolf, likewise Wright, Ellison, Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Deep in my cortex, the year is divided into reading SEASONS. The period from mid-October to Christmas, for instance, is 'ghost story' time, while JANE Austen and P. G. Wodehouse PRETTY MUCH own April and MAY.