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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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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
Thinker
Rational
Novel
Stop
Write
Writing
Organised
Linear

More quotes by 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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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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But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.
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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He turns to the painting. I fear Mark was right. Who is Mark? A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer. Gregory says, Did you not know?
Hilary Mantel
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'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
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
Hilary Mantel
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
Hilary Mantel
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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
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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To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.
Hilary Mantel
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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel