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

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.

I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.

If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch.

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

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

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

Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

'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.

'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.

The thing I love about Rome is that is has so many layers. In it, you can follow anything that interests you: town planning, architecture, churches or culture. It's a city rich in antiquity and early Christian treasures, and just endlessly fascinating. There's nowhere else like it.

I always try to travel light.

Dickens was very practical and sensible.

When you live with Dickens for years, reading him and trying to present him as faithfully as you can, you can't fail to love the man - so the shock of his bad behaviour is considerable, even when you know it is coming.

It's an odd situation: I could not write about someone for whom I felt no affection or admiration.

I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is clear that he did.

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

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

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

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

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.

I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.

My life was a sort of series of random disasters.

In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose songs they had come across.

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.

I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.

I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards, to take books seriously.

I have been left-wing always, from childhood.

Dickens is always full of surprises.

As a young man, Dickens worked as a reporter in the House of Commons and hated it. He felt that all politicians spoke with the same voice.

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.

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

'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.

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

I do read music, but I prefer playing from the heart.

Sometimes you just do things and let your natural self become a part of what you're doing.

Before the Berlin Wall came down, we played behind the Iron Curtain and sang, 'Born in the U.S.A.,' and I thought, 'We're all going to die. The man is going to get us all killed.' But then you saw all these kids with the American flag and German flags together and singing the song, and it was, wow, like 'We Shall Overcome.'

Being involved in the well-being and advancement of one's own community is a most natural thing to do.

When a fan says, 'Man, you saved my life; I heard 'Jungleland'... and I cried... and I felt joy in my life again,' that's my hall of fame.

The calm mind allows one to connect with the inner self, the Soul, the very source of our being. That's where the music lives. That's where my music comes from.

When you learn a Bruce Springsteen song, it's like learning to ride a bike. You don't forget it.

I wanted an electric train for Christmas but I got the saxophone instead.

When you die, we go back to the white energy of all the white energy: white heat that's flung against the sky and becomes a star.

All this pain is going to come back and make me stronger.

There'll be no oiling up with this band. The oil has been there for years and it only gets better.

As a horn player, the greatest compliment one can get is when a person comes to you and says, 'I heard this saxophone on the radio the other day and I knew it was you. I don't know the song, but I know it was you on sax.'

I look forward to working out every day.

The word spiritual, not the word religious, is the key.