Hilary Mantel quotes - page 2

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. (Hilary Mantel)

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Hilary Mantel

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

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.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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

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

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

Hilary Mantel

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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. (Hilary Mantel)

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

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel

Occupation: English Writer
Born: July 6, 1952
Died: September 22, 2022
Quotes count: 65

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