Hilary Mantel Quotes

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

A truly creative person rids him or herself of all self-imposed limitations.

I'm always looking for something new: a new inspiration, a new philosophy, a new way to look at something, new talent.

It should be one's sole endeavor to see everything afresh and create it anew.

You have to get a little untrapped from too much prior knowledge.

The new idea for me now is creativity. I like to express myself.

You have to be as original as possible. It's a tough thing to come up with something totally original.

Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour.

There's so much going on today. I continually hear, sometimes from artists, that everything's done. It's been done. I fail to see that.

New ways I go, a new speech comes to me; weary I grow, like all creators, of the old tongues. My spirit no longer wants to walk on worn soles.

I pay attention to what's going on around me. I'm always looking for new energy, new talent, new voices. When you do that I think it's easier to come up with fresh ideas. It's not that my career has been based on surprising people, but it's been about challenging myself - to constantly do new things that are going to broaden my own mind and in the process, hopefully, connect with other people.

If your mind is at work, we're in danger of reproducing another cliche. If we can keep our minds out of it and our thoughts out of it, maybe we'll come up with something original.

You can take as much as you can from the generation that has preceded you, but then it's up to you to make something new.

If you want to explore things you haven't explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties.

I think young artists are always inspiring because they are coming at worlds from a different point of view.

I watch people who are not driven by creativity any more, and I think how dull it must be to produce the same kind of thing. If you don't feel you're reaching something new, then don't do it.

The more things you do outside of your norm, the more ideas you get exposed to, the more people you get exposed to, and I think that's interesting.

When you are pushing yourself to not go back to the same well, you're gonna come up with something different, or you'll find songs that are different.

Our biggest goal is to continue to force ourselves to always start our creative work on a white page and not take advantage of past successes and challenging ourselves.

Any new ideas go into PiL. My inspiration is everything that the human being gets up to. I don't listen to any music when I'm in PiL-zone, because influences can poison your well. Otherwise, I listen to anything.

There are no original ideas. There are only original people.

Don't just rehash what came before. Find new things to do with it, in your unique voice.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

You get inspiration from craziest places. It's just about being creative. You gotta step outside that box, you know what I'm saying, to reach the people. You never know who can feel it; who it can connect to.