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
feminism
Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
prayer silence house
You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
kings thinking ears
You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
jokes
It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
holy
By the tits of Holy Agnes
statutes written
A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
novelists chance historian
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
protective polished has-beens
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
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.
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.
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.
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.