83 Quotes by Claire Tomalin

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

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

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

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

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

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 is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.

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

Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.