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

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

More quotes by 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
Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Hilary Mantel
Image
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Hilary Mantel
Image
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Hilary Mantel
Image
To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.
Hilary Mantel
Image
I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
Hilary Mantel
Image
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
Hilary Mantel
Image
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
Hilary Mantel
Image
I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
Image
No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Hilary Mantel
Image
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Those who are made can be unmade.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel