Hilary Mantel Quotes

109 quotes in 1801 categories

• Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
• When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real…
• Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
• There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an…
• A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
• 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 or market. It…
• Beneath every history, another history.
• Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
• I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be…
• He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland…
• Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
• A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and…
• And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of…
• I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
• Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
• Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental…
• I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about…
• Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
• But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
• My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

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