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" After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters. "
Claire Tomalin
Characters
Creator
Great
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" 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
More
World
Energy
" 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 washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier. "
Claire Tomalin
Memories
Baby
Football
" 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
Vision
Children
Mother
" I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a contract, a small sum of money, then nothing. "
Claire Tomalin
Book
Small
Life
" 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
Life
Think
Sometimes
" 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
Quiet
Meet
Me
" I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again. "
Claire Tomalin
Autumn
School
Learning
" I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40. "
Claire Tomalin
My Own
Books
Writing
" When I wrote about Mary Wollstonecraft, I found that here she was, in the late 18th century, going to work for the 'Analytical Review.' What was the 'Analytical Review?' It was a magazine that dealt with politics and literature. "
Claire Tomalin
Politics
Work
Literature
" It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration. "
Claire Tomalin
Situation
Affection
Write
" You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them. "
Claire Tomalin
Become
Over
You
" Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans. "
Claire Tomalin
His
Life
Passionately
" Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films. "
Claire Tomalin
Most
How
Books
" Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies. "
Claire Tomalin
Dickens
Like
Writing
" I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book. "
Claire Tomalin
Always
Come
End
" I would like to have a more social life than I have. "
Claire Tomalin
More
Social Life
Life
" I have been left-wing always, from childhood. "
Claire Tomalin
Left-Wing
Always
Been
" I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it. "
Claire Tomalin
Job
New
Thinking
" '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
Christmas
Story
Perfect
" It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child. "
Claire Tomalin
Difficult
Child
Thing
" I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man. "
Claire Tomalin
Out
She
Be A Man
" Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs. "
Claire Tomalin
Movement
Letters
Evidence
" All writers behave badly. All people behave badly. "
Claire Tomalin
Writers
All People
Behave
" 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. "
Claire Tomalin
Time
Poetry
Think
" In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across. "
Claire Tomalin
Same
Me
Time
" Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington. "
Claire Tomalin
First
Because
School
" 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. "
Claire Tomalin
Know
You
Die
" '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
Better
Thought
See
" 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
Day
Lunch
Start
" Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings. "
Claire Tomalin
Lover
Human
Dickens