Hilary Mantel quotes - page 3

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information. (Hilary Mantel)
Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition. View quote
Hilary Mantel
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.' View quote
Hilary Mantel
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. View quote
Hilary Mantel
Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. View quote
Hilary Mantel
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. View quote
Hilary Mantel
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. View quote
Hilary Mantel
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. View quote
Hilary Mantel
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. View quote
Hilary Mantel
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. View quote
Hilary Mantel
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. (Hilary Mantel)
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late. View quote
Hilary Mantel
I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad. View quote
Hilary Mantel
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. View quote
Hilary Mantel
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much. View quote
Hilary Mantel