Everybody is vulnerable through love of their children. Hostages to fortune.
All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.
All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.
The young Dickens was so alive, so self-confident, so funny.
By the time I went up to Cambridge, I was extremely quiet and well behaved, although I now meet people who remember me as not like that at all.
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.