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

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

" 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. "

" I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century. "

" 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 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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