Hilary Mantel: When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel...

One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.

Hilary Mantel

greedy denial self

To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.

Hilary Mantel

essentials kind looks

[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.

Hilary Mantel

fake mind class

Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

Hilary Mantel

assassination threat leader

I will get into trouble, I am sure, because since my Kate Middleton speech and before, certain papers were after me. I am not saying, however, that it would have been moral or right to assassinate Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher, but I know it will be read that way. I know it will cause a problem.

Hilary Mantel

speech paper way

When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

Hilary Mantel

stories islands people

I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.

Hilary Mantel

tomorrow mind thinking

I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.

Hilary Mantel

couple interesting thinking

There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].

Hilary Mantel

monarchy world interesting

In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.

Hilary Mantel

men war order

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

somewhere-else writing book

To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.

Hilary Mantel

burning lost-love people

For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.

Hilary Mantel

novelists people moving

I love playing Mary, and I love being part of a show that for all of us has been really special, none of us ever imagined how huge a success it would become. Why would I want to leave that?

Hilary Mantel

entertainment

There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.

Hilary Mantel

you process want life

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

step change character world

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.

Hilary Mantel

choose write who revolution

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

face feeling you losing

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

Hilary Mantel

either write you sex

I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.

Hilary Mantel

great look time people

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.