Quotes About Dickens

I was brought up on Dickens. I remember reading 'Bleak House' but, coming back to it, I didn't remember much about it apart from a few characters.

Sarah Phelps is such an incredibly detailed writer. She's famous for bringing literature to life, like Dickens and Agatha Christie.

I see in Cambridge, particularly among the women dons, a series of such grotesques! It is almost like a caricature series from Dickens to see our head table at Newnham.

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.

The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.

I'm not a Dickens guy. In grad school I had to take at least one course on the Victorians, so I took The Later Dickens, because that was what there was.

I read a lot when I was at college, but really, only a few of Dickens's books work for me.

I hadn't read Dickens for a while and doing 'Bleak House' was great.

There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

Not surprisingly, Dickens was also something of a neat freak. He brushed his thinning hair hundreds of times a day, even whipping out a comb in the middle of a dinner party if he sensed a single strand out of place.

Just about the only affliction Mesmerism seemed powerless to cure was the one that plagued Dickens the most: asthma. So he found relief the old-fashioned way: He took opium.

If the physical world were a novel, with the business of examining evil and good, it would not have the clear lines of Dickens but the shadowy ambiguities of Dostoevsky.

She wonders how he will get out of the easy chair in a way that's remotely graceful. He'll stand to top up her wine, then perhaps hold her glass while he leans over to kiss her again. Novelists have this same problem, she thinks, Dickens and Austen and everyone since: how to get people in and out of rooms, up and out of chairs.

I inhaled Dickens as a kid, and I've always been fascinated by the Victorians. So many ridiculous objects they had! They created things like mustache cups, so you wouldn't wet your mustache when you were drinking tea. And eyebrow combs. What's happened to all the eyebrow combs? Marvelous things.

It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.

On Dickens) No other writer is quite as good at making marriage vows about remaining together "till death us do part" sound more like a suicide pact.

Ho un amico che non ama Dickens. Non so se compatirlo o picchiarlo.

One novel has been all my reading, Our Mutual Friend, one of the cleverest that Dickens has written.

Dickens's humanity and compassion made an extraordinary impact on Victorian England through his writings, which remain immensely popular. This bicentenary should help renew our commitment to improving the lot of the disadvantaged of our own day." - The Very Reverend Dr John Hall, Dean of Westminster Abbey, on today's 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens' birth.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.

Dickens' plots are his most discardable properties, and often have to be pushed aside to let the strange poetry of his imagination emerge.

The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.