571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

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

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.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

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

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

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

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.