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" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
Story
Atmosphere
Short
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" Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. "
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" 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. "
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" I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. "
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" Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up. "
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" 'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. "
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" 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. "
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" As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way. "
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" Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you. "
Hilary Mantel
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" 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. "
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" Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs. "
Hilary Mantel
House
Start
Recognition
" 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
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Too Much
" 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
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Step
" A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers. "
Hilary Mantel
Novel
Questions
Should
" What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. "
Hilary Mantel
Different
Where
History
" I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. "
Hilary Mantel
Attention
Language
Only
" My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant. "
Hilary Mantel
Career
Knight
Involved
" I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? "
Hilary Mantel
Would
I Am
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" 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
World
Think
Life
" History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. "
Hilary Mantel
History
Us
Time
" My first two novels were very black comedies. "
Hilary Mantel
Very
Were
Black
" 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
" 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
Heart
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" 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
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" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
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" 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
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" 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
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Panic
Own
" Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy. "
Hilary Mantel
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" 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
" 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
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Why
" 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