Claire Tomalin Quotes

Poor Nelly, she was not to know that fashions in sin change as much as other fashions.

Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

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.

She was the sort of person whose mood preceded her into the room whenever she arrived, an extra presence that could not be ignored.

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.

It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration.

You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.

Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.

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.

'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.

When dealing with a subject who is dead, you have this feeling of being God. You know who they're going to marry, when they're going to die. It's strange to feel so omniscient.

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.

'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.

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.

I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

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.

I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.

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.

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.

I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.

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.

When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the 'Analytical Review.' What was the 'Analytical Review?' It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature.

I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.

I always try to travel light.

Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.

The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

He saw the world more vividly than other people, and reacted to what he saw with laughter, horror, indignation, and sometimes sobs.

I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.

It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.

I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

Dickens belongs to the English people.

He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens.

When you live with Dickens for years, reading him and trying to present him as faithfully as you can, you can't fail to love the man - so the shock of his bad behaviour is considerable, even when you know it is coming.

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.

I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.

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.

Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.

'Philomena' was even better than I had expected. I was so pleased to see the evil Irish nuns thoroughly exposed, and I thought Judi Dench gave a flawless performance, as did everybody else.

I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.

Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

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.

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.