Hilary Mantel Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.”

“Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.”

“My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.”

“I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?”

“I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'”

“If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.”

“Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.”

“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.”

“When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.”

“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.”