83 Quotes by Claire Tomalin

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

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden until the past few years.

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.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.

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.

Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.

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.

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.