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

Procrastination

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" 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. "

" Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up. "

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

" There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process. "

" 'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.' "

" 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. "

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

" Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered. "

" When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. "

" 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. "

" The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition. "

Human Condition

" I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line. "

" I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets. "