Claire Tomalin Quotes
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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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'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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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 the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
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I always try to travel light.
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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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I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.
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I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.
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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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It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration.
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I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.
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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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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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Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
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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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Dickens belongs to the English people.
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It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.
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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'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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I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.
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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.
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Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.