English - Writer | July 6, 1952 -
When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.
Hilary Mantel
YouSexWriteReadEither
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
YourselfWorldLookingYouWayGet
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.
LifeMotherWomenYouBecomeYour
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.
GreatTimePeopleResearchDetails
Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.
PastChildSmallConnectionKind
My first two novels were very black comedies.
BlackFirstTwoVeryNovelsWere
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.
MedicalYouSayMental IllnessNotes
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
MindIdeasBodySometimesActive
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.
RevolutionChooseWriteWhoFrench
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
PeopleInformationCraftRealEmpty
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
PeopleThoughtsSimplifyUpShape
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
ViceHindsightNecessaryHistorian
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