Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
Personality
Think
Become
Related Quotes:
" 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
True
Panic
Own
" 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
" 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
" 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
Balance
Writing
Think
" My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on. "
Hilary Mantel
Thing
Been
I Can
" What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. "
Hilary Mantel
Different
Where
History
" 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
" 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
" Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep. "
Hilary Mantel
Insights
Move
Arrive
" Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. "
Hilary Mantel
People
Act
I Am
" 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
" Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up. "
Hilary Mantel
Consequences
Teach
Help
" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
Comment
People
News
" I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? "
Hilary Mantel
Would
I Am
Happy
" Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. "
Hilary Mantel
Behind
Fear
Lies
" As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way. "
Hilary Mantel
Yourself
World
Way
" Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition. "
Hilary Mantel
Human
Human Condition
Memory
" The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth. "
Hilary Mantel
Less
More
Truth
" 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
" But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it. "
Hilary Mantel
Remember
Story
Ever
" 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? "
Hilary Mantel
Good
Day
Short
" 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
" 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
Anxiety
You
Lost
" 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
" 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
Play
Work
You
" 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
" 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. "
Hilary Mantel
Pain
Career
Constant
" Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. "
Hilary Mantel
Shape
People
Like
" 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
" When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you. "
Hilary Mantel
Help
Personality
Fat