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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. "

Hilary Mantel

You

Mother

Life

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

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

" History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. "

Hilary Mantel

History

Time

" My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

" 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. "

" My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. "

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

" I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing. "

" 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. "

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

Hilary Mantel

Less

Truth

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

" I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. "

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

" My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me. "

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

" 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. "