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Hilary Mantel Quotes


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Quotes by Hilary Mantel

Showing 41-50 of 76 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.

~Hilary Mantel

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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.

~Hilary Mantel

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'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

~Hilary Mantel

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When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.

~Hilary Mantel

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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

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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.

~Hilary Mantel

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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

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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.

~Hilary Mantel

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If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.

~Hilary Mantel

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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

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Biography

Nationality: English

Type: Writer

Born: July 6th, 1952

Links

Find Hilary Mantel on Amazon

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