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

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" Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance. "

" Why do we read biography? Why do we choose to write it? Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives. This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading. "

" I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster. "

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

" 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. "

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

" My life was a sort of series of random disasters. "

" I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 always full of surprises. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" Dickens belongs to the English people. "

" I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends. "

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

" When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common. "

" The book doesn't end when you finish writing it. "

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