Writer Quotes by Hilary Mantel

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

— Hilary Mantel

Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.

— Hilary Mantel

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

— Hilary Mantel

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

— Hilary Mantel

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

— Hilary Mantel

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

— Hilary Mantel

There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want…

— Hilary Mantel

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so…

— Hilary Mantel

“I believe it’s fine to give up books even after a page; there’s so much to read in the world that will…

— Hilary Mantel

Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for…

— Hilary Mantel

I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would…

— Hilary Mantel

When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you…

— Hilary Mantel

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into…

— Hilary Mantel

“The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.”

— Hilary Mantel

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear,…

— Hilary Mantel

Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by…

— Hilary Mantel

The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many…

— Hilary Mantel

You can control and censor a child's reading, but you can't control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that…

— Hilary Mantel

Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It's better to say that you haven't got the right pencil…

— Hilary Mantel

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970,…

— Hilary Mantel

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees…

— Hilary Mantel

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to…

— Hilary Mantel

“Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write.” The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of…

— Hilary Mantel

Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly…

— Hilary Mantel

“Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those…

— Hilary Mantel

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

— Hilary Mantel

“Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.”

— Hilary Mantel

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a…

— Hilary Mantel

Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in…

— Hilary Mantel

“Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all.”

— Hilary Mantel

“A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don’t have it, at least…

— Hilary Mantel

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a…

— Hilary Mantel

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in…

— Hilary Mantel

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience…

— Hilary Mantel

Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it,…

— Hilary Mantel

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose.…

— Hilary Mantel

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind.…

— Hilary Mantel

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish…

— Hilary Mantel

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes…

— Hilary Mantel

“When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of…

— Hilary Mantel