Zitat des Tages von Hilary Mantel:
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.
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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.
Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
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.
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
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.
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.
'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
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?
It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.
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.
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.
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
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.
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.
