My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn’t know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people’s unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we’re going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
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. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It’s better to say that you haven’t got the right pencil than to say you can’t write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it’s better lost. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
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. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
Like every writer, I’m drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
