Hilary Mantel Quotes & Sayings (Page 7)

“My first two novels were very black comedies.”

“Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.”

“'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.”

“What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.”

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

“Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy.”

“Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.”

“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.”

“It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.”

“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.”