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All Quotes by author - Claire Tomalin
" '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. "
Christmas
Story
Perfect
" After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters. "
Characters
Creator
Great
" All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends. "
Me
Closest
About
" All writers behave badly. All people behave badly. "
Writers
All People
Behave
" As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice. "
Politicians
Man
House
" 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 up his mind to keep the year free of the pressure of producing monthly installments of yet another long novel. "
Tired
Rest
Mind
" Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington. "
First
Because
School
" Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs. "
Movement
Letters
Evidence
" 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 general picture of the past presented by historians. "
Picture
Traffic
Women
" 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. "
Nature
Difficult
Far
" 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. "
Quiet
Meet
Me
" Dickens belongs to the English people. "
English
Dickens
People
" Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be. "
More
World
Energy
" Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings. "
Lover
Human
Dickens
" Dickens is always full of surprises. "
Dickens
Full
Always
" 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. "
Never
Forward
Political
" Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century. "
Christmas
Know
Today
" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "
Practical
Dickens
Very
" 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. "
Vision
Children
Mother
" 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 protector of orphans, helper of the needy, man of good works, the republican. The hater and the lover of America. The giver of parties, the magician, the traveler. "
Good
Man
America
" Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples. "
Events
Time
Historians
" I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book. "
Always
Come
End
" I always try to travel light. "
Travel
Light
Always
" I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts. "
Society
Concerts
Concert
" I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published. "
Been
More
Book
" I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40. "
My Own
Books
Writing
" I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again. "
Autumn
School
Learning
" I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious. "
Read
Whole
Yes
" 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. "
Day
Lunch
Start
" 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. "
Book
Small
Life
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