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Writing Quotes by Hilary Mantel
- 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…
- 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…
- Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
- I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
- I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
- 'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
- 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…
- In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing…
- When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you…
- Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you…
- Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and…
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then… — Paul Auster
- When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of Blair and little Bush… — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
- A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit. — Richard Bach
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- Writing comes more easily if you have something to say. — Sholem Asch
- Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core… — Isaac Asimov
- If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster. — Isaac Asimov
- Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not. — Isaac Asimov