Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

Movies are like a machine that generates empathy.

I do suspect my star ratings average too high. But, of course, star ratings are ridiculous. I'm stuck with them.

Class is often invisible in America in the movies, and usually not the subject of the film.

There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

Aren't you getting tired of people hating one another? What do they think they get out of it?

We must try to contribute joy to the world... I didn't always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.