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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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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
Ill
Constant
Decided
Career
Careers
Accommodate
Needed
Prospect
Pain
Cure
Writing
Cures
More quotes by Hilary Mantel
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
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Hilary Mantel
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
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Hilary Mantel
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
Hilary Mantel
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Hilary Mantel
Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
Hilary Mantel
[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
Hilary Mantel
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Hilary Mantel
By the tits of Holy Agnes
Hilary Mantel
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
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
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
Hilary Mantel
I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
Hilary Mantel
I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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
[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Hilary Mantel
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel
