Hilary Mantel Quotes

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

I think the way you become a good storyteller is to read a lot of stories and evaluate them in your own mind.

I get thousands of letters, and they give me a feeling of how each book is perceived. Often I think I have written about a certain theme, but by reading the letters or reviews, I realise that everybody sees the book differently.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.

Themes only arise after a novel is written, and people begin to try to talk about it.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

Readers often bring a different set of criteria to the work based on the format.

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

a good reader makes a good book

I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.

What with the reviews of critics, the sarcasms of one's friends, the reproaches of one's own taste, there's precious little peace after publishing a book.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

As the work progresses the careful reader will insert mental interrogation points here and there. He will find that his interest increases as the interrogation points become more frequent, and that it culminates where they are changed to marks of positive dissent. I venture to record the opinion that the value of the work reaches a maximum in a passage that is demonstrably incorrect.