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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
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Hilary Mantel
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 6
Essayist
Film Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Hilary Mary Thompson
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel
Ruts
Stuck
Writer
Looking
Certain
Way
World
More quotes by Hilary Mantel
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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.
Hilary Mantel
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
Hilary Mantel
I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.
Hilary Mantel
To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.
Hilary Mantel
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
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.'
Hilary Mantel
What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
Hilary Mantel
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
If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
Hilary Mantel
[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
Hilary Mantel
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
I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
Hilary Mantel
The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
Hilary Mantel
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Hilary Mantel
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
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
By the tits of Holy Agnes
Hilary Mantel
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
My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
Hilary Mantel