Top 100 Dickens Quotes

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.

With its vastly complicated plot and its immense cast of characters swirling around the case of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce that has been grinding away in the Court of Chancery for decades, ‘Bleak House’ is, for many readers, Dickens’s greatest novel.

I like to do really good things. But ‘good’ – witness Charles Dickens – doesn’t mean ‘not popular.’

I admire Dickens beyond words. He is one of the greatest plotters of all times. Didn’t have a clue about women, but he sure could plot.

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.

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

It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text. It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet. They can use grammar and put words together in interesting and convincing ways – and, I think, unexpected and beautiful ways.

Dickens was very practical and sensible.

The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.

For much of my adult life, I believed, inaccurately, that I knew the story of Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ – that I remembered it from childhood.

Sarah Phelps is such an incredibly detailed writer. She’s famous for bringing literature to life, like Dickens and Agatha Christie.

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

When I was a little girl, my first link to the world was as a reader. Sometimes, I feel a nostalgia for those times, for all the emotions I felt as a child – discovering novels, discovering Dickens, Balzac, or Dostoevsky. I wanted to be like those men.

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

There’s such a wealth of literature from the 18th century and 19th century, George Eliot… Jane Austen… that’s all about a genteel high society, relationships, all of that stuff. There wasn’t ever really, apart from Dickens, a literary evocation of working class life.

As new technology emerges as the greatest challenge to novels since the advent of film, it may be that the fragmentation of storytelling into installments key to Dickens’s era will be recreated in some way.

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.

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

England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others… I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens… I adopted them passionately.

Considering what a prolific writer Dickens was, the word ‘Dickensian’ could legitimately cover a vast thematic territory, explaining at least some of the variety of its applications.

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.

‘Great Expectations’ 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’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.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like ‘The Wire’ or ‘The Sopranos.’ There’s one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

I think that with Bob Dylan around, we’re living in an era where we have Whitman presenting new work, we have Dickens presenting new work, we have Yeats and Shakespeare presenting new work. It’s that level.

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

What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.

The man Dickens, whom the world at large thought it knew, stood for all the Victorian virtues – probity, kindness, hard work, sympathy for the down-trodden, the sanctity of domestic life – even as his novels exposed the violence, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of the Victorian age.

Not until somebody turns round and says, ‘Art, how do you fancy playing Charles Dickens? How do you fancy playing Prince Charles in this biopic?’ Until those movements come, then no, we haven’t got past anything.

I think one of the few faults in Dickens is that mostly his lead characters are blanks – who is David Copperfield, who is Oliver Twist? And yet he takes such joy in populating the rest of his novels with these fantastic, grotesque people like Pecksmith and so on.

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

Dickens belongs to the English people.

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.

I was a promiscuous reader. I loved Nancy Drew books and Tom Swift – never the Hardy Boys – but I also read Dumas, Dickens, Poe, Conan Doyle, and Cornelius Ryan’s war books. As to favorite character: I’m torn between Nancy, on whom I had an unseemly crush, and Edmond Dantes, the Count of Monte Cristo.

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

I’ve read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy – the novels and letters – and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.

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

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.

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

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

I’m sure I’ve been influenced by every fine writer I’ve ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

As a schoolboy, I loved Charles Dickens. His ‘David Copperfield’ has had the strongest influence on me – I looked up to David Copperfield as a role model.

My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ when I left high school, which has always been very special to me – it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I’m also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.

When I was a little girl, I thought I was Sydney Carton in Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ I don’t think anyone else did.

At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.

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

I don’t know if it’s the sunshine, or the fact that I actually have a job, but I do like L.A. a lot. In New York, it can be gray and rainy and cold, and you still don’t have any money, and you feel like a bad Dickens character.

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

I’ve never finished anything by Dickens.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

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