Claire Tomalin Quotes

45 quotes in 568 categories

• Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
• 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…
• 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,…
• All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
• 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…
• 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.
• I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.
• I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.
• After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
• Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.
• Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
• In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.
• 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,…
• Dickens belongs to the English people.
• The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.
• 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…
• 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…
• One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no…
• I would like to have a more social life than I have.
• I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.

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