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.
— Claire Tomalin
Dickens belongs to the English people.
In 1843, everybody was hungry, unemployed, and conditions were very bad.
After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.
I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.
I continually get more information about a subject after the book has been published.
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.
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.
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 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.
Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
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.
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.
The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.
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.
Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.
The book doesn't end when you finish writing it.
I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.
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.
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.
