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. – Claire Tomalin
All the people I have written about remain with me – perhaps they are my closest friends. – Claire Tomalin
I’ve behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven’t behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you’re a woman, you’re not in a position to behave as badly, because you don’t have the economic power. – Claire Tomalin
Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor. – Claire Tomalin
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. – Claire Tomalin
I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published. – Claire Tomalin
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. – Claire Tomalin
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. – Claire Tomalin
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. – Claire Tomalin
I think people are always saying things are ‘over.’ Fiction has been regularly ‘over’ since the 19th century. – Claire Tomalin
I think it’s about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man. – Claire Tomalin
‘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. – Claire Tomalin
‘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. – Claire Tomalin
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. – Claire Tomalin
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. – 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. – Claire Tomalin
It’s an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration. – Claire Tomalin
Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn’t be. – Claire Tomalin
Everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens. The child-victim, the irrepressibly ambitious young man, the reporter, the demonic worker, the tireless walker. The radical, the protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler. – Claire Tomalin
