- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
Hilary Mantel Quotes
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Duplicate
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- Nov 07, 2020
'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
- I Am
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- Nov 07, 2020
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
- Late
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- Nov 07, 2020
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- House
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- Nov 07, 2020
Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs.
- Displace
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Myself
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- May
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Character
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Every
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- Nov 07, 2020
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
- Handed
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Bag
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Convent
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Career
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- Nov 07, 2020
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
- Information
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
- Disaster
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- Nov 07, 2020
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.
- Nov 07, 2020
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
- Nov 07, 2020
When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.
- Nov 07, 2020
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
- Mother
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Great
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Connection
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Memories
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- First
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- Nov 07, 2020
My first two novels were very black comedies.
- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
- Choose
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Centers
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- Nov 07, 2020
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
- Make
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- Nov 07, 2020
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
- Historian
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- Nov 07, 2020
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
- Human
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- Nov 07, 2020
Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
- I Can
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- Nov 07, 2020
My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Feel
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Rational
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
- Only
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- Nov 07, 2020
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.
- Money
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- French Revolution
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- Nov 07, 2020
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
- Art
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Difficult
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Nov 07, 2020
Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.
- Me
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- Nov 07, 2020
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.
- Mad
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- Nov 07, 2020
I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and I thought I might do some good.
- Fat
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- Nov 07, 2020