Quotes from Claire Tomalin

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

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

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.

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.

I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing.

Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

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.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

Dickens was very practical and sensible.

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.

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 was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

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

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

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

Dickens belongs to the English people.

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.

The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.

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

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.

The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.

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