Anna Quindlen Quotes

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

I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.

But since doing the film ["The Invisible Woman"] I've really learned to appreciate [Charles Dickens], he's phenomenal. "Great Expectations" would be one of my favorites.

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

Ever since I was young, I've read Austen and the Brontes. My friends laugh, but those books are always so tragic and wonderful - those stories, they're just incredible.

I'm guilty of it myself, sort of thinking, 'Classic novels: snoozeville.' But there is a huge amount of wonderful material.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

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.

Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and so many others were my dearest friends and greatest teachers.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

I grew up reading 'Sense and Sensibility' and 'Pride and Prejudice' - girly kind of books.

Is 'The Wind in the Willows' a children's book? Is 'Alice in Wonderland?' Is 'Treasure Island?' These are masterpieces which we read with pleasure as children, but with how much more pleasure when we are grown-up.

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

I love books that stand the test of time.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

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.

Let's face it: the 19th century really was the great age of the novel - Melville, Hawthorne, Tolstoy. These are the people I really admire.

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.

Jane Austen wrote six of the most beloved novels in the English language, we are informed at the end of Becoming Jane, and so she did. The key word is beloved. Her admirers do not analyze her books so much as they just plain love them to pieces.

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.

I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.

I want people to be open to the idea of sitting down and reading a Dickens book. They will also have a great time.

I grew up on Jane Austen novels and was a massive literature fanatic when I was a kid - I read everything I could get my hands on.

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.