Hilary Mantel Quotes

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Hilary Mantel

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 6, 1952

It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.

Hilary Mantel

Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.

Hilary Mantel

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

Hilary Mantel

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 I thought I might do some good.

Hilary Mantel

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

Hilary Mantel

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

Hilary Mantel

When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.

Hilary Mantel

Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It's better to say that you haven't got the right pencil than to say you can't write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it's better lost.

Hilary Mantel

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 scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Hilary Mantel

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 may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Hilary Mantel

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 a poem. Be flexible.

Hilary Mantel

Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.

Hilary Mantel

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

Hilary Mantel

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

Hilary Mantel

What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true.

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.

Hilary Mantel

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

Hilary Mantel

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

Hilary Mantel

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

Hilary Mantel