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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.
Claire Tomalin -
You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.
Claire Tomalin
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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.
Claire Tomalin -
I have been left-wing always, from childhood.
Claire Tomalin -
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.
Claire Tomalin -
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.
Claire Tomalin -
Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
Claire Tomalin -
After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
Claire Tomalin
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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.
Claire Tomalin -
I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.
Claire Tomalin -
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.
Claire Tomalin -
I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.
Claire Tomalin -
It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.
Claire Tomalin -
I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.
Claire Tomalin
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I always try to travel light.
Claire Tomalin -
All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
Claire Tomalin -
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.
Claire Tomalin -
I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.
Claire Tomalin -
Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
Claire Tomalin -
In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across.
Claire Tomalin
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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.
Claire Tomalin -
Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.
Claire Tomalin -
Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading.
Claire Tomalin -
By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.
Claire Tomalin