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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century. "

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

" Dickens is always full of surprises. "

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

" I always try to travel light. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat. "

" 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 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. "

" Dickens belongs to the English 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. "

" 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. "

" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "