Kevin Kwan Quotes

My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.

I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.

'Bleak House' remains a great novel for me, and I love 'David Copperfield.'

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

I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.

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

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

I love Victorian novels, the way they capture the nuances of the human condition.

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

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.

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 sort of half read Thomas Hardy's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge.' It was assigned in 10th grade, and I just couldn't get into it. About seven years later, I rediscovered Hardy and consumed four of his novels in a row.

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

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

I've always loved Jane Austen's writing.

The two books I've re-read more than any others are Guenter Grass's 'The Tin Drum' and Victor Hugo's 'Notre-Dame de Paris'.

Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen's wonderful - this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.

'Pride and Prejudice' is often compared to 'Cinderella,' but Jane Austen's real 'Cinderella' tale is 'Mansfield Park.'

I'm totally obsessed with Dickens, and 'Great Expectations' was one of the first book's I read when I was still in school in Porthcawl.

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.

I read mostly fiction, a lot of 19th-century novels.

Dickens's final book, 'The Mystery of Edwin Drood,' forms the jumping-off point for my new novel, 'The Last Dickens'. This last work by Dickens has very little social commentary and a pretty tightly efficient storyline and cast of characters. Not necessarily what we think of when we think what characterizes Dickens.

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.

Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.