Hilary Mantel famous quotes

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

#Pain #Writing #Careers

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Skills #Narrative

The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Thinking #Lines #Pages

If the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. The monarchy is mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Couple #Interesting #Mind

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.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Book #Writing #May

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Fashion #Book #Novelists

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Knowledge #People #Desire

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Feminism

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Doors #Truth Is #Easy

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

#Ideas #Play #Narrative

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Life #Thinking #Path

He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Daughter #Father #Fall

You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Prayer #Silence #House

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Blow #Hands #Feelings

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

#Party #Sleep #Exercise

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Years #Long #Goes On

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Kings #Thinking #Ears

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Mother #Father #Winter

It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
-- Hilary Mantel

#People #Trying #Monsters

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Lying #Stories

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Procrastination #Thinking #Imagination

God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Heart #Giving #Flesh

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Mean #Dark #White

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Writing #Cutting #World

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

#Book #Winter #Night

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Book #Writing #People

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Stupid #Thinking #Doe

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap...
-- Hilary Mantel

#Heart #Stranger #Leap

You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Home #Rivers #Mouths

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
-- Hilary Mantel

#New Year #Rocks #Years

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Thinking #Saws #Remember

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
-- Hilary Mantel

#Years #Preparation #Adults

Those who are made can be unmade.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Made

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Character #Black #Desire

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Children #Doe #Generations

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life. [Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]
-- Hilary Mantel

#Girl #Running #Teenage

And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?
-- Hilary Mantel

#Military #July #Secret

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Travel #Home #Ideas

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Taken #Return #Moments

Beneath every history, another history.
-- Hilary Mantel

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

#Protective

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
-- Hilary Mantel

#War #World #Able

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
-- Hilary Mantel

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Mean #Endurance #Purpose

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Real #Believe #Writing

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Memories #Theme #Human Condition

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?
-- Hilary Mantel

#Running #Silly #Boys

Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed? Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, one you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Running #Dog #Strong

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
-- Hilary Mantel

#War #Looks #Sometimes

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Running #Cat #White

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
-- Hilary Mantel

#Joy #Degrees #Impulse

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Heart #Scales #Organs

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

#Ideas #Mind #Body

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Life #Years #Six

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Medical #Mental Illness #Artefacts

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

#Running #Book #Together

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

#Taste #Fiction #Input

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.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Ideas #Lasts #Facts

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.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Writing #Years #Safety

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Memories #Way #Chronology

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Writing #Years #Firsts

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

#Real #People #Historical

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

#People #Different #World

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
-- Hilary Mantel

#People #Shapes #Select

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

#Notebook #Moving #Half

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
-- Hilary Mantel

#Writing #Thinking #Half

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

#Lying #Book #School

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

#Mother #Grandmother #Phases

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Jokes

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Crush #Pride #Men

By the ***** of Holy Agnes
-- Hilary Mantel

#Holy

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Sweet #Lying #Yesterday

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Book #Skulls #Space

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Flower #Fate #Men

I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Clever #Mistake #Book

The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Attitude #Thinking #Trying

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Thinking #Ideas #Peculiar

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.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Writing #Wind #Paper

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

#Blue #Order #People

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

#Clothes #Size #States

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

#World #Way #Ruts

He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Responsibility #August #Law

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Lying #Writing #Commitment

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Book #Answers #Should

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

#History #Giving #Events

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

#Ambition #Boys #Knights

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

#Reading #Self #Judging

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

#Procrastination #Imagination #Delay

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.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Memories #Children #Grandmother

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Vices #Hindsight #Historian

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Writing #Linear #Novel

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

#Party #Careers #Lines

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

#Thinking #Mountain #Information

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

#Thinking #Talking #Mad

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

#Attention #Language #Pastiche

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

#Age #Bags #Cry

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

#Garden #Hands #Very Happy

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

#Past #Littles #Behinds

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
-- Hilary Mantel

#Too Much #Facts #Imaginative