Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? Hilary Mantel Read Quote
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. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
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. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
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. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
