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.
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 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...
Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.
I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.
To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.
The problem with a life spent reading is you know too much.
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.
Gonzo: My name is Charles Dickens. Rizzo the Rat: And my name is Rizzo the Rat... wait a second! You're not Charles Dickens! Gonzo: I am too! Rizzo the Rat: No! A blue furry Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat? Gonzo: Absolutely! Rizzo the Rat: ...
Modernity kills ghostly romance ("The Undying Thing")
We love the night and its quiet; and there is no night that we love so well as that on which the moon is coffined in clouds.
It is well if you go in for revenge to make it as complete as possible. ("The Vengeance Of The Dead")
...the cab of the truck heated up nicely, its windows fogging. I felt like a Dickens character. I thought about explaining that to Mouse, just to occupy my thoughts, but he was suffering enough without being forced to endure Dickens, even by proxy.
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...
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.
Age is not our fault.
I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")
To feel at home, stay at home.
Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!
