Claire Tomalin quotes:

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.

The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There's nowhere else like it.

Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.

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.

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.

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.

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

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 always try to travel light.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.

He could take on anything and everything, it seemed, rather than leave himself time to reflect on his dissatisfaction with his life and what he might do about it.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

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

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.

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

I've been trying to garden all my life - it just happens that I haven't had a big garden until the past few years.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

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.