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

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" Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

French Revolution

" 'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late. "

" 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. "

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

" Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were? "

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

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

" I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen. "

" In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it. "