Explore Quotes by 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.'

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

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 didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

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.

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

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.