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.
I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.
Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.
As I've gotten older I've become a devotee of 19th-century authors, such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot.
I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.
My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.
I think the authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration of Independence] intended to include all men.
All Dickens's humour couldn't save Dickens, save him from his overcrowded life, its sordid and neurotic central tragedy and its premature collapse. But Dickens's humour, and all such humour, has saved or at least greatly served the world.
I am a voracious reader, so it's difficult for me to give a list of my favourite authors of all time.
You can't have a favourite meal, like you can't have a favourite movie or a favourite book or a favourite child.
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.
People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.
Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.
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.