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

Related Quotes:

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

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

" 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? "

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

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

Human Condition

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? "

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

" For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945. "