Hilary Mantel

“I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happi...”

“Those who are made can be unmade.”

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our i...”

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”

“When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they mad...”

“In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.”

“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 th...”

“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.”

“The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this...”

“Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.”

“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.”

“When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.”

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

“You can control and censor a child's reading, but you can't control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself...”

“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 ther...”

“I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on th...”

“Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which wou...”

“Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.”

“'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.”