Dickens Quotes

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

Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm not saying that people have to listen to rock music. It's a great, cool thing and it can really be liberating for a lot of people but, hey, so can Charles Dickens so I'm not going to judge.

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

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.

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.

I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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