Dickens Quotes

Dickens Quote of the day

Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.

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.

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.

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.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

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.

She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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?"

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

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.

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

Who knows but we may count among our intellectual chickens Like them an Earl of Thackeray and p'raps a Duke of Dickens

It does not matter that Dickens' world is not life-like; it is alive.

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.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.

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.

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

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.

Of Dickens' style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules... No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . .he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

In A Midnight Carol Patricia Davis illuminates the dark and brilliant humanity of Charles Dickens -- the man who lived a rags-to-riches life more remarkable than any of his stories.

Jimmy Dickens was the essence of country music and the heart of the Grand Ole Opry.

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

The thing I love about Dickens is the omniscient, omnipotent narrator, and the great confidence of the narrator, which marks 19th-century novelists in general and Dickens in particular.

As soon as Oliver Twist is serialized, people who would never dream of reading [Charles] Dickens, if they hadn't seen him on their box, buy the paperback.

My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.

I am not unique in my elegiac sadness at watching reading die, in the era that celebrates Stephen King and J.K. Rowling rather than Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll.

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.

Charles Dickens was an incredibly cinematic writer. He wrote this one hundred years before there were movies. He writes very thematically. It is amazing.

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.

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

At the age of 9, I read David Copperfield by Dickens. At 14, I read War and Peace by Tolstoy. They're both books I have reread regularly since.

According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Deirdre Maddon has an extraordinary, almost celestial way of telling a story. There are so many great writers now - although I also want to go back and read all of Dickens again.

I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.

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

If you want to study writing, read Dickens

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

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.

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

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.'

Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.

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.