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
mean endurance purpose
Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
real believe writing
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
running silly boys
He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?
war looks sometimes
Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
war world able
No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
heart scales organs
[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
girl running teenage
It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life. [Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]
strong crooks subtle
You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.
fiction input taste
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.
writing historical-novels years
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
creative kind historian
For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
writing years firsts
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
real people historical
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
running book together
For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.