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" When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" '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 was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "