Hilary Mantel: It is all very well planning what you will do in six mo...

The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is.

Hilary Mantel

ethical very-good facts

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 careers writing

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.

Hilary Mantel

lives-of-others phases mother

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

winter night book

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

historical-novels writing book

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

Hilary Mantel

size clothes should-have

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

Hilary Mantel

leap stranger heart

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

Hilary Mantel

rocks new-year years

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

Hilary Mantel

saws remember thinking

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.

Hilary Mantel

subtle crooks strong

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

Hilary Mantel

adults preparation years

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

Hilary Mantel

generations doe children

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

Hilary Mantel

historical people past

Those who are made can be unmade.

Hilary Mantel

made

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.

Hilary Mantel

mental-illness medical notes

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

Hilary Mantel

black desire character

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

Hilary Mantel

generations novelists adults

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.

Hilary Mantel

stupid doe thinking

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

Hilary Mantel

impulse degrees joy

You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.

Hilary Mantel

mouths home rivers

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.