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" 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. "

Claire Tomalin

Memories

Baby

Football

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" The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny. "

" I always try to travel light. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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. "

" The book doesn't end when you finish writing it. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

Claire Tomalin

Dickens

Writing

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

" '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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again. "

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

" Dickens belongs to the English people. "

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

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

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