Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Middle
Just
Cry
Related Quotes:
" 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
Thought
Good
Health
" 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
Audience
You
Why
" 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
Page
Writing
Wolf
" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
See
You
Work
" 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
Life
Support
Myself
" 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
Revolution
Choose
French Revolution
" 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
Notes
Mental Illness
Medical
" Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. "
Hilary Mantel
People
Act
I Am
" Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. "
Hilary Mantel
People
Worlds
Writer
" For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much. "
Hilary Mantel
Life
Working
Too Much
" When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered. "
Hilary Mantel
You
Write
Sex
" 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
Look
Run
Time
" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
Last
Facts
Ideas
" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
Always
Page
Flow
" I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished. "
Hilary Mantel
Protective
I Am
Am
" My first two novels were very black comedies. "
Hilary Mantel
Very
Were
Black
" 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
Winter
Myself
Book
" 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
Feel
Lose
Change
" I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information. "
Hilary Mantel
Think
Good
Lawyer
" I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? "
Hilary Mantel
Would
I Am
Happy
" 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
Memories
Sister
People
" Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties. "
Hilary Mantel
Going
Regret
Sense
" Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. "
Hilary Mantel
Shape
People
Like
" 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
Time
Library
School
" 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
Past
Kind
Child
" 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
Words
Wind
Stand Up
" I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. "
Hilary Mantel
Attention
Language
Only
" 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
Revolution
Writing
Thought
" 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
You
Mother
Life
" 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
Book
Like
Myself