Claire Tomalin Quotes
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I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.
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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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Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
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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 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 was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.
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Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler.
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After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
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I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.
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I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures.
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One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.
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I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did.
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I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.
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All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
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I have been left-wing always, from childhood.
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It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration.
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Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.
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People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.
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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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It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.
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Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
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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.
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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.