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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. "
Hilary Mantel
Rational
You
Write
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" 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
World
Change
Step
" I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? "
Hilary Mantel
Would
I Am
Happy
" Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. "
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" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "
Hilary Mantel
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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. "
Hilary Mantel
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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. "
Hilary Mantel
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" 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
" 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. "
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" 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
" I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad. "
Hilary Mantel
Dead
My Time
Mad
" 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 dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. "
Hilary Mantel
Attention
Language
Only
" What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. "
Hilary Mantel
Different
Where
History
" I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line. "
Hilary Mantel
Never
Party
Line
" 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
" 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
" 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
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" Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. "
Hilary Mantel
People
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I Am
" 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
Reading
Control
" 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
" 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
" 'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. "
Hilary Mantel
Memory
Hall
Duplicate
" Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. "
Hilary Mantel
Behind
Fear
Lies
" When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered. "
Hilary Mantel
You
Write
Sex
" 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
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" Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. "
Hilary Mantel
Information
People
Real
" The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth. "
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Less
More
Truth
" 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
Facts
Art
Work
" 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
" 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