Robert Gottlieb Quotes

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

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.

'Great Expectations' is one of the greatest stories.

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

With my earlier books, I got quite bored being with one protagonist all the way through. With the Alex Morrow books, I wanted to do something a bit more holistic, so there were lots of different points of view, and I wanted to look at aspects of crime that you don't tend to look at.

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.

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

I have seen and really liked the varied movie adaptations of the book, but 'Little Women' has a sprawling, richly tangled story that needs time and space to weave its magic.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

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

As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.

I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.

The mini-series 'The Bronx is Burning' thoroughly embarrassed me the way the story was told.

What's so great about 'Gone Girl' is the conversations it provokes.

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

There was a time when villains were stylized as very fashionable with gelled hair, girls in arms and cigar in mouth but now films have come closer to the reality. Realism has entered our industry.

Films are never meant as solutions; they just provide entertainment value.

I was never academically driven in English, but, again, Tom Waits is a perfect example of an influence. He writes so immaculately and paints so perfectly a world and the characters within it. There are writers like that who are my influences: vivid and gifted storytellers.

I like shows for atmosphere. I don't know, I think a plot-driven show is so boring and masc4masc and gross.

A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.

Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.

'Teachers' is in no way a realistic soap; we're not trying to do that, which is why we never do 'issues.'

Incarcerated individuals want what most people want in a novel: good, honest writing and a story well told.