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
stupid thinking doe
She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
book skulls space
Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.
book winter night
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.
writing thinking should-have
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
age bags cry
I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.
novelists chance historian
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
heart giving flesh
God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
protective polished has-beens
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
mean dark white
Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.
writing cutting world
Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
children generations doe
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
made
Those who are made can be unmade.
medical mental-illness notes
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
writing wind paper
When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.