Claire Tomalin Quotes
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Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
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I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.
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Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.
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When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.
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I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.
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My life was a sort of series of random disasters.
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Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.
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Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.
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The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There's nowhere else like it.
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As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.
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I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
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'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.
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The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
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In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.
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I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing.
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I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.
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You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.
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'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.
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I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.
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I would like to have a more social life than I have.
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All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.
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I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.
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I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.
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I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.