Hilary Mantel Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• 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

  Book, Writing, May

  FaceBook post by Hilary Mantel from Mar 08, 2014

• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Writing, People

• I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Thinking, Should Have

• I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Linear, Novel

  "Hilary Mantel: 'If I'm suffering, I can make that pay'". Interview with Stuart Jeffries, www.theguardian.com. October 17, 2012.

• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Cutting, World

• '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

  Writing, Years, Firsts

• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Thinking, Historical Novels

  "Hilary Mantel, In Brief". Interview with Seymour Glass, www.interviewmagazine.com. September 30, 2014.

• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Historical Novels, Years

• Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't ­really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

  Hilary Mantel

  Morning, Hate, Book

  "Hilary Mantel's rules for writers". www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Pain, Writing, Careers

• When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn't feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn't one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Writing, Somewhere Else

  Source: newrepublic.com

• 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

  Writing, Wind, Paper

  Hilary Mantel (2004). “Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir”, p.200, Macmillan

• My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Writing, Historical Novels

  Source: newrepublic.com

• If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.

  Hilary Mantel

  Morning, Book, Writing

  Source: newrepublic.com

• Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

  Hilary Mantel

  Lying, Writing, Commitment

  "Author, author: Persons from Porlock" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. March 06, 2009.

• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Real, Believe, Writing

  "‘Game of Thrones’ Finale Recap: Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire" by Maureen Ryan, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 4, 2012.

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