Hilary Mantel Quotes

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Hilary Mantel

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 6, 1952

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

Hilary Mantel

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Hilary Mantel

If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change, it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.

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 provincial obscurity.

Hilary Mantel

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

Hilary Mantel

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

Hilary Mantel

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.

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 a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled.

Hilary Mantel

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

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

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

Hilary Mantel

Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs.

Hilary Mantel

My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.

Hilary Mantel

When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.

Hilary Mantel

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 stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

Hilary Mantel

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 illness.

Hilary Mantel

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

Hilary Mantel

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

Hilary Mantel

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, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.

Hilary Mantel

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

Hilary Mantel