Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always try to travel light.
Dickens is always full of surprises.
Dickens belongs to the English people.
Dickens was very practical and sensible.
I have been left-wing always, from childhood.
The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
My life was a sort of series of random disasters.
All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.
I would like to have a more social life than I have.
I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.
It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.
I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.
The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.
The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.
Throughout his life, Dickens cared passionately about orphans.
Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.
I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.
Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.
Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.
In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.
Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.
I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.
Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.
After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
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 the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.
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.
It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration.
When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.
I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.
Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.
Dickens was a part of how the whole celebration of Christmas as we know it today emerged during the 19th century.
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.
I enjoyed the whole process of learning and was always happy when autumn came and school or college started up again.
Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.
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.
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.
Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.
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.
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.
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.
You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.
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.
Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.
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.
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.