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.

— Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel Quotes

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it’s best not to like it too much.

— Hilary Mantel

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

— Hilary Mantel

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

— Hilary Mantel

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

— Hilary Mantel

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

— Hilary Mantel

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

— Hilary Mantel

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it.

— Hilary Mantel

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

— Hilary Mantel

I’m one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

— Hilary Mantel

Hindsight is the historian’s necessary vice.

— Hilary Mantel

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

— Hilary Mantel

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

— Hilary Mantel

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

— Hilary Mantel

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.

— Hilary Mantel

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

I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

— Hilary Mantel

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

— Hilary Mantel

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

— Hilary Mantel

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I’m mad.

— Hilary Mantel

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

— Hilary Mantel
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