Matthew Pearl Quotes

Dickens writes such brilliant characters and stories, and his themes and social commentary are still so relevant. I think that's why he's still so loved today.

The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.

I get sent a lot of scripts which feature him as a kind of all-purpose Victorian literary character and really understand little, if anything, about him, his life or his books.

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.

Dickens belongs to the English people.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

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.

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

I'm not really a political satirist. I don't kid myself. I'm more interested in doing the mannerisms and the personality.

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

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

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.

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.

I think when I was 12, I started reading Evelyn Waugh, and I loved Evelyn Waugh so much, and I thought: 'This is how the world really is. If I could be Evelyn Waugh, then I would be happy.'

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

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

I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book.

But if you read Jane Austen, you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny, but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.

Jane Austen is at the end of the line that begins with Samuel Richardson, which takes wonder and magic out of the novel, treats not the past but the present.

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.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.

I love Oscar Wilde, still the wittiest writer of anyone, dead or living.

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.

The most brilliant satire of all time was 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift. You'll notice how everything got straightened out in Ireland within days of that coming out.