Hilary Mantel Quotes

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Hilary Mantel

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 6, 1952

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 their memories.

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

You can control and censor a child's reading, but you can't control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child's heart.

Hilary Mantel

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

Hilary Mantel

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.

Hilary Mantel

I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.

Hilary Mantel

Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.

Hilary Mantel

My first two novels were very black comedies.

Hilary Mantel

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

Hilary Mantel

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

Hilary Mantel

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Hilary Mantel

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Hilary Mantel

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

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 have put it in a box that I never opened.

Hilary Mantel

When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life.

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 write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Hilary Mantel

The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.

Hilary Mantel

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

Hilary Mantel