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" What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. "
Hilary Mantel
Different
Where
History
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. "
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" 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. "
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" 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? "
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" For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much. "
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" 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. "
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" Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties. "
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" 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. "
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" My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on. "
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" 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. "
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" My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant. "
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" History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. "
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