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" 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. "

Claire Tomalin

Picture

Traffic

Women

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad. "

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

Claire Tomalin

Dickens

Writing

" 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 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. "

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

Claire Tomalin

Social Life

Life

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

" 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

Time

" 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. "

Claire Tomalin

Standards

Thought

" I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published. "

Claire Tomalin

Been

Book

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

" Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write. "

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

" 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. "

" I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels. "

" All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends. "

Claire Tomalin

Closest

About

" 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. "

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