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.

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

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

One of my most vivid memories of the mid-1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier.

Philomena' was even better than I had expected. I was so pleased to see the evil Irish nuns thoroughly exposed, and I thought Judi Dench gave a flawless performance, as did everybody else.

I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.

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.

Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.

I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.

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.

Today's children have very short attention spans because they are being reared on dreadful television programmes which are flickering away in the corner.

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.