Hilary Mantel Quotes

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

I love writing letters. In order to write a novel in first person, I think I needed an addressee.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

I know authors shouldn't play favorites with books, but 'Release Me' really is right up there for me. The characters truly came alive on the page and drove the story as much as I did from behind the scenes. It was a pleasure to write, and I'm so thrilled that it's the first of a trilogy because I get to spend more time with the characters.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'

I never outline my novels before I write. I do have a vague sense of beginning, middle, and end at the outset of each book, but for me, writing has always been a very character-driven process.

Usually, when I write a novel, it takes me about 100 pages to figure out the voice of the narrator.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

I never went to school for writing, never took a writing class, but when you're in a room with David Simon and Ed Burns and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, and they're going over something you've written, you learn what works and what doesn't.

To combine telling an interesting story with brilliantly written characters is the most difficult thing to do.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

I am not an analytical writer. Once I flesh out my characters and decide on the elements of my plot, the story unfolds in my head almost as though it was a movie reel.

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

When I first read the script a few years ago I thought it was one of the best written scripts I had ever read.

And the nice thing about writing a novel is you take your time, you sit with the character sometimes nine years, you look very deeply at a situation, unlike in real life when we just kind of snap something out.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.