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.

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

I know it sounds pathetic, but I don't know who I am.

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.

I would like to have a more social life than I have.

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.

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

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

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.

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.

Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.

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