Dickens Quotes

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

  Michael Caine

  Inspiring, Encouragement, Bad Day

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• Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

  Lloyd Alexander

  Teacher, Mark, Dearest Friend

  Lloyd Alexander (2006). “The Foundling: And Other Tales of Prydain”, p.97, Macmillan

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• I called my mom, and I was so excited. I was telling her, 'I'm going to be on the Grand Ole Opry! This is crazy!' And she told me, 'Watch out for Jimmy Dickens, because he likes the pretty girls.

  Carrie Underwood

  Girl, Mom, Crazy

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• 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

  Book, Past, Years

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• I think [Charles] Dickens was an extrovert and Nelly [Ternan] an introvert, and I think that Nelly saw beyond the fame and adulation and she actually loved Dickens essentially for who he was. So I think he felt like she was someone he could be himself with.

  Felicity Jones

  Thinking, Extroverts, Saws

  Source: www.shockya.com

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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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• 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.

  William Golding

  Dream, Reading, People

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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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• No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected - you write about it after it's over.

  Martin Amis

  Writing, Abuse, Injustice

  Source: www.vulture.com

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• I've been in the entertainment industry since I was six-years-old ... As Charles Dickens says, 'It's been the best of times, the worst of times.' But I would not change my career ... While some have made deliberate attempts to hurt me, I take it in stride because I have a loving family, a strong faith and wonderful friends and fans who have, and continue, to support me.

  Michael Jackson

  Strong, Hurt, Wonderful Friends

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• It doesn't bother me. Sure, everybody wants approval, but I came from the theatre and I've always treasured a remark from there which goes: 'For every six people who love you, there will be half a dozen who loathe you.' The quality of an author's work is not usually determined until after his death. Even Dickens got some pretty bad reviews.

  Robert Ludlum

  Love You, People, Theatre

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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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• Old Flossie settle down on the other side of What-the-Dickens and dragged some handiwork out of a sack. She armed herself with two thorns shaped into knitting needles. A wodge of curlicued metallic scrubbing pad supplied the threat. 'I knit handcuffs as a hobby,' explained Old Flossie happily, and set to work. 'Idle hands get up to no good, so I like to be prepared in case I meet up with any idle hands.

  Gregory Maguire

  Knitting, Hands, Two

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• A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Kings, Book, Voice

  "Carlos Ruiz Zafón's top 10 20th-century gothic novels" by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, www.theguardian.com. June 2, 2010.

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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 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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• 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.

  Anthony Trollope

  Style, Novelists, Impossible

  Anthony Trollope (1978). “An Autobiography”, p.208, Univ of California Press

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• Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.

  Trevor Phillips

  Book, House, Favourite

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• If you want to study writing, read Dickens

  Shelby Foote

  Writing, Want, Study

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• Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.

  Henning Mankell

  Believe, Book, Writing

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

  Donna Tartt

  Character, Alive, Literature

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• 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.

  Bob Dylan

  Mind, Stories, Sticks

  "Only Human Driftin' And Learnin'" by Sidney Fields. New York Mirror, December 9, 1963.

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• 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 221½ B Baker Street and didn't find him.

  Rex Stout

  Real, Character, Bakers

  "The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times". Book by Mark Van Doren, 1942.

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

  David McCullough

  Way, Scene

  Interview with Bruce Cole, www.neh.gov. 2003.

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• I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.

  William Shakespeare

  Memorable, Names, Windsor

  1597-8 Mistress Page.TheMerryWives ofWindsor, act 3, sc.2, l.16.

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