There's absolutely nothing anyone can say about my mother or myself or my step-father that we haven't heard before. You'd have to be a Dickens or a Nabakov to come up with something really offensive.
Not until somebody turns round and says, 'Art, how do you fancy playing Charles Dickens? How do you fancy playing Prince Charles in this biopic?' Until those movements come, then no, we haven't got past anything.
'Joker' was a violent, dark, and brutal book, so I wanted to do something a little less heavy. I played around with the idea of a children's book, and that eventually became 'Noel.' And I just kept finding these parallels between things I could do with Batman and Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol.'
Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.
I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.
I want people to be open to the idea of sitting down and reading a Dickens book. They will also have a great time.
Between Scott on the earlier side and Dickens and Thackeray on the other, there was an immense production of novels, illustrated by not a few names which should rank high in the second class, while some would promote more than one of them to the first.
The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.
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.
If Nora Roberts were a man, she'd be on the cover of big business magazines as the next Charles Dickens.
In his life, Charles Dickens was like the rest of us, but maybe more so: another poor and wonderful soul attempting to deal with his and the world's pain and confusion in the best way he knew how.
When it comes to referring to Dickens's life, performing plays with your nine children for friends and family during Christmas is Dickensian.
One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.
Something went wrong with my right arm. I no longer could throw hard, and it hurt like the dickens every time I threw.
My favourite authors include Trollope and Dickens.
Familial love can find an echo in our own hearts just as it did in that of Charles Dickens.
Surprisingly, it was not an American but a British company that opened an amusement park in 2007 called Dickens World, located in the English county of Kent, complete with an Ebenezer Scrooge Haunted House, a Great Expectations Boat Ride and the as-advertised 'costumed Dickensian characters.'
Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.
Dickens is always full of surprises.
There's always a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens.
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.
What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.
I don't read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.
From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.
Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.
I've behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven't behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you're a woman, you're not in a position to behave as badly, because you don't have the economic power.
In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.
It's always crude to link Dickens back to the blacking factory where he was sent to work aged 12 when his father was imprisoned in Marshalsea Prison for bad debt, but it was obviously a huge part of him.
My English teachers gave me a copy of Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' when I left high school, which has always been very special to me - it was the novel that introduced me to dystopian fiction. I'm also influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Dickens, John Wyndham and Middle English dream-visions.