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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular. "

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

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

" If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch. "

" Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance. "

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

" I always try to travel light. "

" Dickens was very practical and sensible. "

" Dickens is always full of surprises. "

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

" '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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings. "