Quotes by Hilary Mantel

About Hilary Mantel:

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel is an English writer whose work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.

Hilary Mantel

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.

Hilary Mantel

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

Hilary Mantel

I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen.

Hilary Mantel

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

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

Hilary Mantel

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

Hilary Mantel

You can control and censor a child's reading, but you can't control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child's heart.

Hilary Mantel

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.

Hilary Mantel

My first two novels were very black comedies.

Hilary Mantel

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Hilary Mantel

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.

Hilary Mantel

'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

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

Hilary Mantel

Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.

Hilary Mantel

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

Hilary Mantel

I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.

Hilary Mantel

It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.

Hilary Mantel

My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.

Hilary Mantel

Author Bio

  • NameHilary Mantel
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • BornJuly 6, 1952
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksWolf Hall; Bring Up The Bodies
  • AwardsCommander Of The Order Of The British Empire; Hawthornden Prize; Man Booker Prize; Man Booker Prize