Quotes from Claire Tomalin

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

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden...until the past few years.

I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.

Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

'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 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.

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

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

Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.

'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.

As he approached his 28th birthday in February 1840, Dickens knew himself to be famous, successful and tired. He needed a rest, and he made up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel.

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.

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

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.

I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.

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 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.

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

All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.

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.

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

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.

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