Claire Tomalin Quotes

It's not at all uncommon for a writer to get a ton of publicity for one book and then not get as much for the next one. I don't worry about that because I try to worry about the one single part of the job I can control: the writing of the book. If I do that well, I feel, good tidings generally will follow and readers will stick with me.

The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.

My wife, as proud as she was of me, hated show business for good reasons. There was something about the spouse always being pushed out of the way, shoved aside. She wanted to get away from it.

Online, you're providing each other with the good aspects of being together as far as communication and support, but you don't have to deal with the realities of paying bills together, or being annoyed when they leave the toilet seat up or don't put the food away in the fridge.

I'm not very good at being a wife because I break all the rules.

Recreating the experience of, say, bereavement in my own head is pretty rough. I was used to switching off from emotions every day of my working life as a journalist, but in fiction, you have to feel it 100%, or else it's a flat experience for the reader.

I am not Superwoman. The reality of my daily life is that I'm juggling a lot of balls in the air trying to be a good wife and mother, trying to be the prime-ministerial consort at home and abroad, barrister and charity worker, and sometimes one of the balls gets dropped.

'SNL' is really hard to do when you're single and living alone. And then it's pretty tough when you're married, because you don't see your spouse.

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

It's always good to get good reviews. I read my reviews. There are a lot of writers who don't read their reviews at all. I read them; then I put them away because it's not good to engage with them too much.

When really writing I'm not a good friend. Because writing disorganizes the social self, you become atomized. It scrambles you, sometimes to the point that I'm incapable of speech. I feel that if I start speaking, I'll lose the writing, like getting off the treadmill.

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.

Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?

Every pilot I've ever written, I've fallen deeply and madly in love with. It's the only way I work.

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

When I create characters, I create a world to inhabit and they begin to feel very real for me. I don't belong in a psych ward, I don't think, but they become very real, like my own family, and then I have to say goodbye, close the door, and work on other things.

I immerse myself in everything I write; I feel what my characters do. I suffer with them. I cry as I type, sometimes to the point that I can't see the screen.

It wasn't a good idea to work on 'Naked' in the first months of a marriage. I was living apart from my wife in a flat overflowing with books I was reading for the part.

I think it helps to have a good old-fashioned trajectory, plodding along. Obviously one has an ego and it's really easy to have that ego tickled, but what helps me get through the night is if I concentrate on just quality of work so that I don't panic about my profile.

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

I've been writing my entire life, and I'll always write.

Writers don't retire. I will always be a writer.

I knew 'Like Crazy' would be good, I just knew it, and that's why I fought so hard to be on it.

I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.