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
procrastination imagination privilege
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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.
children memories grandmother
I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.
writing linear novel
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
history giving events
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
attention language pastiche
I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
garden hands very-happy
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
vices hindsight historian
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
facts too-much imaginative
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
lying commitment writing
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
addicted
Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.
common repression time
Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.
fascinates history
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.