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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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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My life was a sort of series of random disasters.
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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 know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.
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Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write.
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I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.
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Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
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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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I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.
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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 enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.
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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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Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever-growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.
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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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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.
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Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.
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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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'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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The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
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All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.