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" 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

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

" 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. "

" My first two novels were very black comedies. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information. "

" 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. "

" For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. "

Hilary Mantel

Shape

People

" 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. "

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

" Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. "

" 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. "

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

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

" Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. "

" When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. "