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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Hilary Mantel

Memories

Sister

People

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Hilary Mantel

Protective

I Am

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

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

" 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? "

" Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Hilary Mantel

History

Time

" My first two novels were very black comedies. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

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