Top 100 Quotes About Dickens
#1. All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.
Anna Quindlen
#2. Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that's why he's still so loved today.
Douglas Booth
#3. 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
#4. I don't fear death
I fear dying before I've read Dickens end to end.
Amy Smith
#5. But I knew better: No matter where you go, the past floods back. You can try like the dickens, but you can't escape fate.
Michael Lee West
#6. I do not think he (Chester Arthur) knows anything. He can quote a verse from poetry or a page from Dickens or Thackeray, but these are only leaves springing from a root out of dry ground. His vital forces are not fed,and very soon he has given out his all.
Harriet Blaine
#7. For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all the time. We know plenty about Goethe and Charles Dickens from what they chose to tell, even though they have been dead for years.
Jodi Picoult
#8. Dickens had, with all his genius, the narrow short sight of his day and class, sentimental tears for poverty but no vision to remove it except by inviting everybody to be as noble a fellow as himself. War
Stephen Leacock
#9. and white wrappers, and this only changed in the 1860s. But Uncle Allan is quite taken with Dickens's and Thackeray's
Sandra Schwab
#10. Movement was the essence of Manhattan. It had always been so, and now its sense of flow, energy, openness, elasticity as Charles Dickens had called it, was headier than ever. Half the city's skill and aspirations seemed to go into the propagation of motion.
Jan Morris
#11. Most of us wait until we're in trouble, and then we pray like the dickens. Wonder what would happen if, some morning, we'd wake up and say, "Anything I can do for You today, Lord?"
Bill Vaughan
#12. As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
Garrison Keillor
#13. If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?
Ralph Ellison
#14. My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.
Eudora Welty
#15. Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.
G.K. Chesterton
#17. From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.
Christopher Moore
#18. Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
John Berger
#19. 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
#20. My affinity, as a novelist, with Dickens has been overstated. I relish the way everything in his prose pulsates with life force, and I'm in debt to him every time I invest inanimate objects with uncanny animism. But his female characters annoy me.
Michel Faber
#21. Dad used to read aloud to us from Dickens and Kipling. My tastes were omnivorous. I read anything I could lay my hands on, but the memory that stays with me is that of my father reading the Jungle Books to us when we were young. Beautiful stories!
A.B. Guthrie Jr.
#22. A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him.
[An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]
Rex Stout
#23. But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren't storming the gates.
Steven Johnson
#24. Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.
Peter Ackroyd
#25. Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of art.
(Last words, according to Dickens's obituary in The Times.)
Charles Dickens
#26. When you live with Dickens for years, reading him and trying to present him as faithfully as you can, you can't fail to love the man - so the shock of his bad behaviour is considerable, even when you know it is coming.
Claire Tomalin
#27. Customer: Did Charles Dickens ever write anything fun?
Jen Campbell
#28. In Charles Dickens's books I had to admire the way the meanest enemies spoke to each other, with what seemed to me to be the greatest civility.
Jane Hamilton
#29. As a creator of character his peculiarity is that he creates wherever his eyes rest ... With such a power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire.
Virginia Woolf
#30. I'm totally obsessed with Dickens, and 'Great Expectations' was one of the first book's I read when I was still in school in Porthcawl.
Paul Rhys
#31. Sure, at heart I wanted to be a Dickens, but I hated being great on command.
Rachel Heffington
#32. If you have this enormous talent, it's got you by the balls, it's a demon. You can't be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn't that nice a guy.
Dustin Hoffman
#33. At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
Michel Faber
#34. 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.
Lev Grossman
#35. as the Charles Dickens formula for success has it: "Make them laugh. Make them cry. But, most of all, make them wait."6
Jack R. Hart
#36. Let's get one thing clear between us, Shiloh. I would never laugh at you. I might tease the dickens out of you, but I would never, ever make fun of you. That's not who I am. I don't believe in humiliating another person. It's not in my DNA.
Lindsay McKenna
#37. 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
#38. I've come to realize that however blue my circumstances, if after finishing a chapter of a Dickens novel I feel a miss-my-stop-on-the-train sort of compulsion to read on, then everything is probably going to be just fine.
Amor Towles
#39. I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.
Goldwin Smith
#40. Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.
John Boyne
#41. My respect for the law was diminishing with every exchange. Dickens was right. The law is an ass, and I was starting to think that people are asses as well.
Wendy Buonaventura
#42. You cannot read Dickens without putting in a little more effort. You cannot eat a ripe pawpaw without its innards and juice spilling down your chin. Likewise, the language of Dickens makes your mouth do strange things, and when you're not used to his words your jaw will creak.
Lloyd Jones
#43. Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.
Claire Tomalin
#45. I've always liked the classic "young adult" writers like Mark Twain, Jack London, Roald Dahl, Charles Dickens. They write so clearly, and they know how to entertain.
Arthur Bradford
#46. Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
Michael Caine
#47. Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
Terry Pratchett
#48. [President Johnson] had the political will to say that having one in five Americans living in the kind of abject conditions their fellow citizens associated with Third World countries and the novels of Dickens was as dangerous as any battlefield enemy.
Anna Quindlen
#51. I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks - who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.
Mark Gatiss
#52. It is characteristic of Dickens who, when he grasps the wrong end of the stick, never fails to belabour everyone in sight with it.
Peter Ackroyd
#53. Of course they had more chains on him than Scrooge saw on Marley's ghost, but he could have kicked up dickens if he'd wanted. That's a pun, son.
Stephen King
#54. When Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor, where he started, they had to keep it secret because there was such a mob of people expecting him, and they actually chased down his carriage at the hotel, the Parker House Hotel.
Matthew Pearl
#55. For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favorite of God and Dickens
Mark Forsyth
#56. The cab of the truck heated up nicely, its windows fogging. I felt like a Dickens character. I thought about explaining that to Mouse, just to occupy my thoughts, but he was suffering enough without being forced to endure Dickens, even by proxy.
Jim Butcher
#57. Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
George Orwell
#58. An adaptation I was working on of Trollope's 'The Pallisers' has been axed by the BBC ... I was also going to do Dickens' 'Dombey and Son' but they've asked me to do 'David Copperfield' instead.
Andrew Davies
#59. Very few conversations with Charles Dickens did not include a laugh from him. I had never met a man so given to laughter. Almost no moment or context was too serious for this author not to find some levity in it, as some of us had discovered to our embarrassment at funerals.
Dan Simmons
#60. The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
Jennifer Egan
#61. 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
#62. Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.
Claire Tomalin
#63. She read Dickens in the same spirit she would have eloped with him.
Eudora Welty
#64. Oh no! My subconscious slams down her Complete Works of Charles Dickens, leaps up from her armchair, and puts her hands on her hips.
E.L. James
#65. Convince is for thought; persuade is for action. You couldn't convince me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you persuaded me to do it anyway, didn't you, you little dickens?
Monica Wood
#66. 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
#67. What's ready? Was Steinback ready? Hemingway? Shakespeare? Dickens? Jane Austen? They just did it, didn't they?
Danielle Steel
#68. I don't know if it's the sunshine, or the fact that I actually have a job, but I do like L.A. a lot. In New York, it can be gray and rainy and cold, and you still don't have any money, and you feel like a bad Dickens character.
Rich Sommer
#69. Tolkien is as good as Dickens at sketching a scene.
Ian McKellen
#70. I can't imagine how American readers will react to a novel, but if the story is appealing it doesn't matter much if you don't catch all the detail. I'm not too familiar with the geography of nineteenth century London, for instance, but I still enjoy reading Dickens.
Haruki Murakami
#71. These incident acquaintances and the twisted stories that grew out of them, made John thinking that "Charles Dickens" was not just another pub, but a special place in the Universe, where life itself ties the knots.
Darren H. Pryce
#72. Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.
Simon Callow
#73. With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, 'Bleak House' is, for many readers, Dickens's greatest novel.
Robert Gottlieb
#74. Statesmen, men of science, philanthropists, the acknowledged benefactors of their race, might pass away, and yet not leave the void which will be caused by the death of Charles Dickens.
The London Times
#75. You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie.
'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.'
'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.'
'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife.
Nick Hornby
#76. My great-aunt ... said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens ... She was right.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#77. To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.
Per Petterson
#78. As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens's era will be recreated in some way.
Matthew Pearl
#79. I promise myself great pleasure from my visit to England. You know I am to stay with Dickens while in London; and beside his own very agreeable society, I shall enjoy that of the most noted literary men of the day, which will be a great gratification to me.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#80. I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.
Mordecai Richler
#81. Something went wrong with my right arm. I no longer could throw hard, and it hurt like the dickens every time I threw.
Dazzy Vance
#82. The English criminal code, later known as the "Bloody Code," was brutal in the late 18th century. By the time the first legal reforms were enacted in 1826, 220 crimes - many of them relatively petty crimes against property as Dickens describes in the rest of the paragraph - were punishable by death.
Susanne Alleyn
#83. 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
#84. Matthew and I used to read Dickens together. Oh my god, it was so great. We would sit in the bathtub and pass the book back and forth reading passages out loud.
Sarah Jessica Parker
#85. I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did.
Claire Tomalin
#87. 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.
Shelby Foote
#88. The thing about Dickens is you either love him or you hate him and I fell in love with Dickens, I fell in love with his prose style and I decided that I wanted to read the whole Dickens verve during the course of my life.
George Brandis
#89. (On Charles Dickens) It has been the peculiarity and the marvel of this man's power, that he has invested his puppets with a charm that has enabled him to dispense with human nature.
Anthony Trollope
#90. Dickens enjoyed human beings as he found them, unregenerate, peculiar and incorrigibly themselves.
John N. Gray
#91. 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.
Burn Gorman
#92. I would happily storm hell in the company of these troops ... how strongly they have demonstrated to the world that free men and women can fight like the dickens.
James Mattis
#93. Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.
Andrew Davies
#94. I claim Dickens as a mentor. He's my teacher. He's one of my driving forces.
Anne Rice
#95. The married thing. Sometimes I look at it and feel like someone from a Dickens novel, standing outside in the cold and staring in at Christmas dinner. Relationships hadn't ever really worked for me. I think it's had something to do with all the demons, ghosts, and human sacrifice.
Jim Butcher
#96. Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
Claire Tomalin
#97. 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
#98. It is wonderful how Virtue turns from dirty stockings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance.
From Charles Dickens' Preface to Oliver Twist, printed in 1841
Charles Dickens
#99. Later, I came to see that Mr. Dickens and Mr. Wordsworth were thinking of men like me when they wrote their words. But most of all, I believe that Mr. Shakespeare was. Mind you, I cannot always make sense of what he says, but it will come.
Mary Ann Shaffer
#100. Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.
Samuel Fuller
