Feist Quotes

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

There are a lot of very good New York novels, but there's no single all-encompassing novel, the way you could look at any number of Dickens books and say we know London as a result of that.

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

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

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

My neighborhood in South London was very Dickensian.

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.

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn't put it down - I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

When I read Dickens for the first time, I thought he was Jewish, because he wrote about oppression and bigotry, all the things that my father talked about.

Dickens belongs to the English people.

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.

I am obsessed with the whole Victoriana thing, the whole Jack the Ripper London era, the grayness of it, the haunted feeling of it, all ancient and bloody.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

A lot of London's image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.

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.

I remember I had a copy of 'David Copperfield' that I lugged around at primary school. I started reading it when I was seven, and I was eight when I finished it. I read an awful lot as a little girl and played games and imagined lots of things.

In size and population Manchester is the second city in the United Kingdom, containing above four-score thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents ... where you hear from within ... the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of to their prayers…. if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment

England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.

'A People's History of the United States' was actually a very big book for me. I read it in high school, and I felt like my mind was really blown by it. I think the truth is I read it because it's referenced in 'Good Will Hunting.'

I did a co-authored book not so long ago that was an American historical romance set at the turn of the century. I'm fascinated by that period in time and would love to do more.

The Industrial Revolution has two phases: one material, the other social; one concerning the making of things, the other concerning the making of men.

I'm from the Midlands. I lived in London for 50 years, but I'm not sure that I think of myself as a Londoner. I can see that we're all metropolitan, whether we are Londoners or not.

O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.

'Island of the Blue Dolphins' by Scott O'Dell had a huge impact on me.

London is a city of ghosts; you feel them here. Not just of people, but eras. The ghost of empire, or the blitz, the plague, the smoky ghost of the Great Fire that gave us Christopher Wren's churches and ushered in the Georgian city.