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" After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters. "

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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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again. "

" I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40. "

" 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. "

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

" You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them. "

" Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans. "

" Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films. "

" Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies. "

" I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book. "

" I would like to have a more social life than I have. "

" I have been left-wing always, from childhood. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child. "

" I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man. "

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

" All writers behave badly. All people behave badly. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

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