Top 44 Claire Tomalin Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

‘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.

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

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

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

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

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

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

Writing Charles Dickens’ biography is like writing five biographies.

Dickens was very practical and sensible.

Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.

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

Dickens is always full of surprises.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dickens belongs to the English people.

‘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.

Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.

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.

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

I always try to travel light.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

‘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.

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.