Dickens Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.

  Andrew Davies

  Humour

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• But since doing the film ["The Invisible Woman"] I've really learned to appreciate [Charles Dickens], he's phenomenal. "Great Expectations" would be one of my favorites.

  Felicity Jones

  Appreciate, Expectations, Would Be

  Source: www.shockya.com

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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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• 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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• No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.

  George Orwell

  Children, Views, Childhood

  George Orwell, Keith Gessen (2009). “All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays”, p.14, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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.

  Archibald MacLeish

  Character, Frustration, America

  Archibald MacLeish (1978). “Riders on the Earth: essays and recollections”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH)

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• I love Dickens because it makes me chuckle to myself so. He has taken me to another world and out of so many earthly miseries.

  Jane Birkin

  Taken, World, Misery

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• If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

  George Orwell

  Character, Class, Ordinary

  George Orwell (1970). “A Collection of Essays”, p.50, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• What I find really attractive is something that's going to be a little dangerous. Something that might get me into trouble; you know, you turn up in London and you've just rewritten Dickens. And, of course, then you think, 'What have I done?

  Peter Carey

  Thinking, Done, Littles

  "Peter Carey: making it up as he goes along" by Emma Brockes, www.theguardian.com. March 16, 2012.

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• Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

  Simon Callow

  Heart, Men, Injustice

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• I think the success of 'Downton' is partly because there are effectively 18 leading characters, all given equal importance, so it's enormously involving on many levels. But also, it's a new story. It's not like Dickens or Austen, where everyone knows the denouement.

  Michelle Dockery

  Character, Thinking, Stories

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

  Joseph Brodsky

  Grief, Believe, Reading

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• My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.

  Debbie Macomber

  Children, Wall, Names

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• It was easy to believe, between lessons on Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen, that all of the great stories had already been written by dead Europeans. But every time I saw 'The Outsiders', I knew better. It was the first time I'd realized that real people write books.

  Ally Carter

  Real, Believe, Book

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• There's more of yourself in a book than a play. that's why we know all about Dickens and not much about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.

  John Mortimer

  Book, Play, People

  "This much I know". Interview with Jonathan Heawood, www.theguardian.com. May 25, 2002.

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• The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

  George Orwell

  Believe, Tired, Stories

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison (1998). “The Complete Works of George Orwell: A patriot after all, 1940-1941”

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• Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

  Nick Hornby

  Writing, Character, Class

  Nick Hornby (2004). “The Polysyllabic Spree”, McSweeneys Books

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• We Woosters freeze like the dickens when we seek sympathy and meet with cold reserve. "Nothing further Jeeves", I said with quiet dignity.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Jeeves, Dignity, Quiet

  P.G. Wodehouse (2009). “The Inimitable Jeeves: (Jeeves & Wooster)”, p.210, Random House

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• I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.

  Jane Smiley

  Book, Writing, Breathing

  Jane Smiley (2014). “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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• A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.'

  Tony Kushner

  Uncles, Drama, Heart

  "Tony Kushner: 'At first I was horrified'". Interview with Michael Billington, www.theguardian.com. August 15, 2011.

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• Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians.

  Ben Okri

  Country, Character, Ghetto

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• Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today. Let me repeat that: Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today! I mean it. Shakespeare was a better stylist, Melville was more important to American letters, and Charles Dickens had a defter hand at creating characters. But among living writers, there is nobody who can even approach Gene Wolfe for brilliance of prose, clarity of thought, and depth in meaning

  Michael Swanwick

  Character, Mean, Hands

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• Born Losers is a beautiful piece of writing. Scott Sandage is history's Dickens; his bleak house, the late nineteenth century world of almost anonymous American men who failed. With wit and sympathy, Sandage illuminates the grey world of credit evaluation, a little studied smothering arm of capitalism. This is history as it should be, a work of art exploring the social cost of our past.

  William S. McFeely

  Beautiful, Art, Writing

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• When I was 14 or 15, our teacher introduced us to Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities.' It was just for entertainment - we read it aloud - and all of a sudden it became a treasure.

  Dermot Healy

  Teacher, Cities, Two

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