Claire Tomalin

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.”

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

“'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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.”

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

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

“I always try to travel light.”

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

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

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