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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

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
Lies
Behinds
Behind
Lying
Fear
Writing
Commitment

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.
Hilary Mantel
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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Hilary Mantel
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
Hilary Mantel
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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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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
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[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
Hilary Mantel
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The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
Hilary Mantel
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Hilary Mantel
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
Hilary Mantel
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
Hilary Mantel
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You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
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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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Hilary Mantel