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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

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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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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
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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
Hilary Mantel
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
Hilary Mantel
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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
Hilary Mantel
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
Hilary Mantel
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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Hilary Mantel
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My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
Hilary Mantel