Top 74 Quotes & Sayings by Claire Tomalin - Page 2

Dickens is always full of surprises.

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.

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

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

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 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.

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

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.

Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.

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

'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.

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

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