Hilary Mantel Quotes - BrainyQuote

English - Writer Born: July 6, 1952

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.

Music Walk You People

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

Work You Imagination Privilege

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.

Life You Want Process

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.

Change Character World Step

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.

Revolution Choose Who Write

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.

Place Safety Revolution Writing

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.

Myself Together Book Way

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.

You Face Feeling Losing

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.

Knowledge History Experience Student

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

Me Think Writing Wolf

Top 10
Hilary Mantel
Quotes

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

You Sex Write Either

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

You Yourself World Looking

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.

Life Mother Women You

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.

Time People Great Look

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.

Past Child Small Connection

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.

Memories Children People Sister

My first two novels were very black comedies.

Black Two First Very

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.

You Medical Your Mental Illness

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

Mind Sometimes Ideas Body

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

People Information Real Always

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

Thoughts People Like Make

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Hindsight Necessary Vice Historian

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

Memory Human Theme Condition

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.

Thoughts I Can Been Rely

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.

Personality Think Never Just

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.

You People Happy Feel

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