Dickens Quotes - Page 2

• I remember one review of The Office Christmas Special that compared it unfavourably to Dickens. What? You're saying I'm not as good as the greatest storyteller ever. Boo! Boo! I think I can live with that.

  Ricky Gervais

  Thinking, Office, Special

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• So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.

  Philip Kitcher

  Fighting, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I think that when [Charles] Dickens met Nelly [Ternan] it unleashed this sort of carnal, anarchic, cruel energy within him, and literally after she met him he changed his whole life - he separated from [his wife] Catherine, he stopped all the children from seeing her and went on this bitter rampage.

  Felicity Jones

  Children, Thinking, Wife

  Source: www.shockya.com

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• Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.

  Trevor Phillips

  Book, House, Favourite

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• My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

  Kevin McCloud

  Favourite

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• I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.

  Eileen Myles

  Writing, Epic, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

  Alan King

  Father, Firsts, Oppression

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• We are better givers than getters, not because we are generous people, but because we are proud, arrogant people. The Christmas story-the one according to Luke, not Dickens-is not about how blessed it is to be givers but about how essential it is to see ourselves as receivers.

  William Henry Willimon

  Blessed, People, Proud

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• I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.

  Feist

  London, Charmed

  "Feist: 'I was basically raised by the Muppets'". Interview with Gareth Grundy, www.theguardian.com. December 4, 2010.

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• One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

  Danny Boyle

  Cities, Growth, London

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, film.avclub.com. November 26, 2008.

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• We were put to Dickens as children but it never quite took. That unremitting humanity soon had me cheesed off.

  Alan Bennett

  Children, Cheesy, Humanity

  Old Country (1978) act 2

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• Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.

  Margaret Atwood

  Once Upon A Time, Novelists, Century

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• Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

  Maya Angelou

  Mean, Men, Rude

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• There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.

  Dylan Moran

  Voice, Literature, Singers

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

  Ben Okri

  Home, Literature, London

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• I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.

  Tom Peters

  Book, People, Fiction

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• As I've gotten older I've become a devotee of 19th-century authors, such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot.

  David Duchovny

  Century, Eliot, Devotee

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• 150 years ago in [Charles] Dickens's time there was at least a sense of craft. So some of the things people had inside of them, they had the possibility of expressing in the making of things - even in a daily way with their clothes or their food. People made a good deal of both themselves. Now our daily lives are almost all consumption. Craft plays a tiny role.

  Zadie Smith

  Clothes, Years, Play

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Children, Father, Cry

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• Dickens is a much misunderstood and mis-approached writer, in that he tends to be read, particularly in the twentieth century, as a social commentator - like the great Victorians, a realist in his way. But he isn't at all like that. His genre is actually more like a fairy tale - weird transformations, long voyages from which people come back altered, parental mysteries, semi-magical twists.

  Martin Amis

  Genre Is, Long, People

  "New New Yorker Martin Amis Talks Terrorism, Pornography, Idyllic Brooklyn and American Decline". Interview with David Wallace-Wells, www.vulture.com. July 22, 2012.

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• The Five Points was the toughest street corner in the world. That's how it was known. In fact, Charles Dickens visited it in the 1850s and he said it was worse than anything he'd seen in the East End of London.

  Martin Scorsese

  East, World, London

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• Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

  Anne Rice

  Thinking, Moments, Enough

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• I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.

  Anne Rice

  Teacher, Mentor, Driving

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• Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Literature, Hawthorne

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.

  Jodi Picoult

  Thinking, Fiction, Use

  "The great unknown". Interview with Louise France, www.theguardian.com. April 14, 2007.

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