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
alter change details fill historical narrative point step
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world.
again destroyed entire existing fantasize furniture state
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.
history interested less truth
The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.
actions novels
Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.
My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.
connection felt intimate reverence since
Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.
beside people seldom serene state
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.
hearts less people rational taken untrained walks writers
Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy.
books life might normal plenty reverse
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.
gave images itself manifested perhaps sensory whether
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.
anybody books function good hours life night outset possible realised writer
Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?
difficult drama period spoke
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.
good health might stop territory
Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and I thought I might do some good.
When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.