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" 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. "

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" Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel. "

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

Procrastination

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" My first two novels were very black comedies. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. "

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

" As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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