For all those teachers who have to persuade their classes, and all the students to have to be persuaded, that A Tale of Two Cities or Bleak House is worth slogging through, here's a tribute to Dickens published in the New York Times Book Review, 10 April 2016, p. 8, from Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator and star of the Broadway smash hit, the hip-hop musical Hamilton, sold out through January 2017 already:

I’m most in awe of novelists, who move sets, lights, scenery, and act out all the parts in your mind for you. My kind of writing [for the theater] requires collaboration with others to truly ignite. But I think of Dickens, or Cervantes, or Márquez, or Morrison, and I can describe to you the worlds they paint and inhabit. To engender empathy and create a world using only words is the closest thing we have to magic.