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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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 always try to travel light. "

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

" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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