Quote

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

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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
Well
Ready
Writing
Audience
Would
Read
Time
Write
Vanished
Like
Else
Perceived
May
Market
Wells
Anybody
Book
Wouldn

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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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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.
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
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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.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.
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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
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If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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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.
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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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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