Top 45 Hilary Mantel Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

‘Show up at the desk’ is one of the first rules of writing, but for ‘Wolf Hall’ I was about 30 years late.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.

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

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.

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.

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

My first two novels were very black comedies.

Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.

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.

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

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can’t help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.

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.

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.

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.

Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.

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.

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

I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

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.

‘Wolf Hall’ attempts to duplicate not the historian’s chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

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

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.

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.

Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it’s good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?

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