The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don’t know which bits are true. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
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. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
Sometimes people ask, ‘Does writing make you happy?’ But I think that’s beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you’re off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that’s where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
When I was a child, there was very little money, so I’ve always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
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. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it’s not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns. Hilary Mantel Read Quote
