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.
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.
It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D. C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.
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.
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.
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.
I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene.
Taking the humour out of Dickens, it's not Dickens any more.
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
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.
According to Dickens, the first rule of human nature is self-preservation and when I forgive him for writing a character as pathetic as Oliver Twist, I'll thank him for the advice.
I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.
I always felt like I was right out of Dickens, looking in the window of the Christmas feast, but not at the feast.
I cannot tell what the dickens his name is.
Louis de Bernires is in the direct line that runs through Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. . . he has only to look into his world, one senses, for it to rush into reality, colours and touch and taste.
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.
A modern-day Dickens with a popular voice and a genius for storytelling in any genre, Stephen King has written many wonderful books.
Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.
If you want to study writing, read Dickens
My great-aunt. . . . said nobody under 18 had any business reading Dickens. . . . She was right.
