Best 12 quotes of Claire Tomalin on MyQuotes

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

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Being himself was more exhausting than impersonating a stage character.

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.

Mary Wollstonecraft was the first person to apply the phrase 'legal prostitution' to marriage.