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
writing historical-novels years
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
writing wind paper
When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.
writing years firsts
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
lying commitment writing
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
writing linear novel
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
writing thinking should-have
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
real believe writing
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
writing cutting world
Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
book writing people
Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
pain writing careers
In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
writing thinking historical-novels
You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
book writing may
Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
bad concerned difference financial finding life meant money practical throughout trying writer
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.
anguished criticise establish flow says screen writer
The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it.