Claire Tomalin Quotes
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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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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 continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.
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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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After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
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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 always try to travel light.
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I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.
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I have been left-wing always, from childhood.
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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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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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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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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 a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.
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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 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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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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I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.
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All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
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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.
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Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
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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.
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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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Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.