Quote

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Hilary Mantel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Rational
Novel
Stop
Write
Writing
Organised
Linear
Thinker

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

Image
The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
Hilary Mantel
Image
This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
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
Image
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
Hilary Mantel
Image
At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
Hilary Mantel
Image
[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
Image
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
Hilary Mantel
Image
People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel
Image
[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
Hilary Mantel
Image
[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.
Hilary Mantel
Image
She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
Hilary Mantel