Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, DBE FRSL, is an English writer whose work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth6 July 1952
party careers lines
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
should-have clothes size
When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
garden hands very-happy
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
addicted
Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.
fascinates history
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.
ascribe complete
When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.
gave images itself manifested perhaps sensory whether
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.
books life might normal plenty reverse
There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.
hearts less people rational taken untrained walks writers
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.
beside people seldom serene state
Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled.
accounts available background deal details finding gone great involved people run scene side spend time
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.
suppressed
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.
alter banal censor control evolve guess inside itself message ridiculous seems
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.
began characters chose french provincial wrote
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.