English - Writer | July 6, 1952 -
Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
MemoryHumanThemeHuman Condition
My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.
ThoughtsI CanBeenRelyThing
I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life.
LifeMyselfMoneySupportChildBad
The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.
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I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
LanguageAttentionDislikeOnly
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.
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Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.
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My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.
ChildhoodPeopleMeWorldPowerful
I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.
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