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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. "

Hilary Mantel

People

Blue

My Life

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

Hilary Mantel

Protective

I Am

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Hilary Mantel

Book

Myself

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened. "

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

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

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

Hilary Mantel

History

Time

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it. "

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

" The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey. "

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

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