Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, DBE FRSL (/mænˈtɛl/ man-TEL; born Thompson, 6 July 1952), is an English writer whose work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction.
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.
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.
You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along. '
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.
You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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.
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.