Hilary Mantel Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.”

“The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.”

“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.”

“If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change, it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.”

“As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.”

“I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.”

“My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.”

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

“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.”

“I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.”