Top 276 Dickens Quotes & Sayings

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

Great Expectations [book by Charles Dickens] has been described as "Dickens's harshest indictment of society." Which it is. After all, it's about money. About not having enough money; about the fever of the getting of money; about having too much money; about the taint of money.

I think Austin is read more now than Charles Dickens, and Dickens was much more popular in his day. She endures because of her classicism.

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.

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.

Tolkien is as good as Dickens at sketching a scene.

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.

I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.

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

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

Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.

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

Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.

In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.

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.

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

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

Charles Dickens left us fifteen novels, and in an ideal world, everyone would read all of them.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

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

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

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.

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

I wrote the Dickens book because I loved Dickens, not because I felt a kinship with him, but after writing the book it seemed to me that there was at least one similarity between us and that was that Dickens loved to write and wrote with the ease and conviction of breathing. Me, too.

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.

Bleak House by Charles Dickens is my favourite book.

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

Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)

When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.

Charles Dickens' creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race - I say it in all seriousness - than Cardinal Newman's Lead Kindly Light Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.

I've never finished anything by Dickens.

Dickens was very practical and sensible.

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

If you're going to be related to someone it might as well be Dickens.

I hadn't read Dickens for a while and doing 'Bleak House' was great.

I read a lot when I was at college, but really, only a few of Dickens's books work for me.

Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.

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

If Nora Roberts were a man, she'd be on the cover of big business magazines as the next Charles Dickens.

Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.

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.

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.

If you want to study writing, read Dickens

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

I was into Virginia Woolf and James Joyce [at university] and I think we all thought that [Charles] Dickens wasn't that cool.

Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe ... that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.

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

I will fight like the dickens to protect Social Security.

I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.

Dickens belongs to the English people.

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

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.

Capra's great passion was Dickens. As soon as he had some money, he bought some of the rarest and most extraordinary editions of Dickens's work, and he was very proud of his collection.

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

We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.

Once upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.