Browsing Topic Best Dickens Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 promise to charm the dickens out of him,’ said Will, sitting up and readjusting his crushed hat. ‘I shall charm him with such force that when I am done, he will be left lying limply on the ground, trying to remember his own name.’ ‘The man’s eighty-nine’, muttered Jem. ‘He may well have the problem anyway.

In fact I don’t think of literature, or music, or any art form as having a nationality. Where you’re born is simply an accident of fate. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be more interested in say, Dickens, than in an author from Barcelona simply because I wasn’t born in the UK. I do not have an ethno-centric view of things, much less of literature. Books hold no passports. There’s only one true literary tradition: the human.

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.

Little Jimmy Dickens has long been a musical hero of mine and one of the finest entertainers to ever step on any stage. I was deeply honored to call him a friend and will always remember the time I got to spend with him. The music world has lost one of our greatest treasures. Rest in peace, my little friend. You were loved by so many of us!

The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint … but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.

I had a very sparse comic upbringing – not because I was being whipped into reading Chekhov and Dickens, but I read Asterix on holidays when I was a kid, and Tin Tin was featured, I remember, for a few years.

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.

As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.

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.

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

It struck me that the popularity of Christmas is a matter of web-like consciousness. Childhood conditions us to relax and expand at Christmas, to forget petty worries and irritations and think in terms of universal peace. And so Christmas is the nearest to mystical experience that most human beings ever approach, with its memories of Dickens and Irving’s Bracebridge Hall.

Attention spans are changing. It’s very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won’t be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don’t know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Stephen King has the exact ability that Charles Dickens had. To get to his readers in spite of or despite anything the reviews say.

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.