Claire Tomalin

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

“Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.”

“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 protecto...”

“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 a...”

“'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.”

“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 pow...”

“Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.”

“You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.”

“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.”

“Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.”

“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.”

“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 ge...”