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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
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World
Energy
Related Quotes:
" Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies. "
Claire Tomalin
Dickens
Like
Writing
" 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 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. "
Claire Tomalin
Never
Forward
Political
" 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
Up
" 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
" 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
" Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance. "
Claire Tomalin
Appearance
Feel
Sort
" Because my father is French, my first school was the Lycee Francais de Londres in Kensington. "
Claire Tomalin
First
Because
School
" '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
" I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster. "
Claire Tomalin
Convinced
Disaster
Total
" I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious. "
Claire Tomalin
Read
Whole
Yes
" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "
Claire Tomalin
Practical
Dickens
Very
" I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did. "
Claire Tomalin
Anything
Been
Wrong
" '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
" 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
" The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny. "
Claire Tomalin
Funny
Young
Dickens
" It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration. "
Claire Tomalin
Situation
Affection
Write
" 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
" Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner. "
Claire Tomalin
Short
Today
Attention
" When you live with Dickens for years, reading him and trying to present him as faithfully as you can, you can't fail to love the man - so the shock of his bad behaviour is considerable, even when you know it is coming. "
Claire Tomalin
Love
Know
Live
" 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. "
Claire Tomalin
English
Book
Child
" 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. "
Claire Tomalin
Tired
Rest
Mind
" I have been left-wing always, from childhood. "
Claire Tomalin
Left-Wing
Always
Been
" After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters. "
Claire Tomalin
Characters
Creator
Great
" I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people. "
Claire Tomalin
Writing
Small
People
" 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. "
Claire Tomalin
Bad
Choose
People
" 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
" 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. "
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Time
Poetry
Think
" I've behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven't behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you're a woman, you're not in a position to behave as badly, because you don't have the economic power. "
Claire Tomalin
My Life
Hope
Power
" I'm interested in history, in trying to relate the past to the present and to understand how people thought about their problems and pleasures. "
Claire Tomalin
History
Past
People