Best Hilary Mantel Quotes
- Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. Hindsight
- History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. Always Changing
- I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished. Anyone
- I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? Bookshops
- I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case. Age
- I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. Attention
- I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad. Dead
- I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information. Been
- I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.' All
- I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line. Been
- I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. All
- If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or… Assume
- Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep. Arrive
- Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. Discard
- Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. Collision
- Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. Affect
- 'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late. Desk
- 'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. Attempts
- If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music,… Bath
- Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels… Actually Learned
- Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it… Bones
- Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to… Allows
- For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a… Bit
- I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book,… Been
- In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing… Accommodate
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