Quotes from Claire Tomalin

As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice.

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.

'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.

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

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.

I would like to have a more social life than I have.

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.

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

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

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.

In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it

Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot

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

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.