Claire Tomalin Quotes

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Claire Tomalin

Profession : Author

Birth : June 20, 1933

Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.

Claire Tomalin

I always feel sad when I come to the end of a book.

Claire Tomalin

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.

Claire Tomalin

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

Claire Tomalin

Dickens was very practical and sensible.

Claire Tomalin

It's a difficult thing to lose a child, a grown-up child.

Claire Tomalin

I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was 12, and I read the whole works. Yes, I was precocious.

Claire Tomalin

Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.

Claire Tomalin

When dealing with a subject who is dead, you have this feeling of being God. You know who they're going to marry, when they're going to die. It's strange to feel so omniscient.

Claire Tomalin

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.

Claire Tomalin

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.

Claire Tomalin

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

Claire Tomalin

'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.

Claire Tomalin

Dickens is a lover of human beings; a relisher of human beings.

Claire Tomalin

I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.

Claire Tomalin

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.

Claire Tomalin

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.

Claire Tomalin

You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding them.

Claire Tomalin

When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.

Claire Tomalin

I think it's about as likely Jane Austen was gay as that she was found out to be a man.

Claire Tomalin