Quotes from Claire Tomalin

My mother told me early that whatever happens to you, however unhappy you may be, you can escape into a book.

Pepys was a good scholar, able to read Latin for pleasure all his life; and that very skill may have helped to leave his English free and uncluttered for the Diary, the language of life as opposed to the elaborately constructed formulations of the classroom and study.

If we beat the king ninety and nine times, yet he is king still and so will his posterity be after him; but if the king beat us once, we shall all be hanged, and our posterity made slaves.

The season of domestic goodwill and festivity must have posed a problem to all good Victorian family men with more than one family to take care of, particularly when there were two lots of children to receive the demonstrations of paternal love.

This is businesslike stuff, but he also lets us feel how his own awareness of the importance of the day through which he is living expands and permeates everything as the hours go by:

He has the good reporter's gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium. After

He has the good reporter's gift for being in the right place at the right moment, and the structure and rhythm of his sentences show how well he has mastered his medium.

The excitement in London gave no guarantees about the future, and he still committed himself to no direct expression of opinion in his Diary.

He then fell into the state of apprehension and despondency usual to writers as they wait for a verdict on their work.

Mary Wollstonecraft was the first person to apply the phrase 'legal prostitution' to marriage.

A whim did not provide a living.

The most striking aspect of Jane's adult letters is their defensiveness. They lack tenderness towards herself as much as towards others ... They are the letters of someone who does not open her heart'. They are also, perhaps, the letters of someone who doesn't dare open her heart, for fear of what she might find there.

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.

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

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.