A Quote by Claire Tomalin

Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.

Claire Tomalin

Quote Topics

Biographies Biography Charles Dickens Five Like Writing

Quote Author

Claire Tomalin
English - Author
Born: June 20, 1933

If you know anything about writing biographies, or what is regarded as a good biography, you have minimum input from the person you are writing about.

Lady Colin Campbell

People say, 'You're like Dickens', but I'm not like Dickens. Zadie Smith is a Dickensian writer because she's writing about society now, just as Dickens was writing about his society.

Sarah Waters

When I was a boy, I began writing a biography of Shakespeare, and since then I've written a number of biographies of actors and famous people.

Gyles Brandreth

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

Simon Sebag Montefiore

Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious.

Russell Freedman

I first wrote a biography of Thomas Carlyle, and it turned out I loved writing biographies and had a talent for it. I believed I had a contribution to make.

Fred Kaplan

If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.

Shelby Foote

I majored in English in college and that was my major in graduate school before switching to creative writing. I read a lot of [Charles] Dickens and [Anthony ] Trollope, but there was lots of stuff I hadn't read like Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," which is so well written and funny.

Stephen Dobyns

I'm reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the less well-known Dickens novels. I've been a life-long lover of Charles Dickens ever since I think A Tale of Two Cities was the first Dickens novel I read.

George Brandis

I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.

Eileen Myles

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

Sammy Hagar

I've never gone through the paces that writing textbooks sometimes recommend, such as writing out a character's biography, or determining what his favorite food is, or most traumatic memory, etc. - that's always seemed like a fraudulent way of assembling a fictional person.

Teddy Wayne

I'm not fond of biographies. I don't like writing about myself.

Wole Soyinka

Outlining is not writing. Coming up with ideas is not writing. Researching is not writing. Creating characters is not writing. Only writing is writing.

Harlan Coben

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing - none of that is writing. Writing is writing. Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

E. L. Doctorow

I'm always writing. A friend of mine once said, 'You avoid re-writing by writing.' Which is kind of a good point, because re-writing seems to be mostly about craft, and writing is just, like, getting out your passion on a piece of paper.

Cameron Crowe

A Quote by Claire Tomalin

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors