What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?

High school is very intense for everyone. But at a boarding school, because you're there 24 hours a day, everything gets magnified.

I've had people say very dismissive things about my books, but I also feel like I probably have more readers because I'm a woman. I mean, more readers are women and more people who buy books are women, so I don't feel like it's a total disadvantage to be a female writer.

I liked the idea of giving Eligible a feminist flavor. While I do think that in Pride and Prejudice, Liz Bennet is very bold, she is also very restricted in terms of what's appropriate for her to do and the ways it's appropriate for her to behave. One of the differences between Pride and Prejudice and Eligible is that my female characters take more initiative in their romantic lives.

I feel that Pride and Prejudice is an incredibly well constructed novel on every level. The dialogue is great. The character development is great. The plotting is great. The pacing is great. The language is great.

I guess in life I find people who, at first glance, appear to be very typical or average, whatever that means, and then turn out to have hidden qualities.

I think it's significantly easier to be a female writer today than in the early 1800's. That said, it's hard to imagine almost anyone who knows anything about publishing disagreeing with the statement that women writers today are often taken much less seriously than men writers. But it's hard to quantify, and even define, what being taken seriously means.