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All Quotes by author - Hilary Mantel

" A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers. "

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

" 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. "

" But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it. "

" 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. "

" Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. "

" Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. "

" Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel. "

" For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much. "

" 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. "

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Procrastination

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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