Hilary Mantel Quotes

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

A novelist should not be too intelligent either, although... he may be permitted to be an intellectual.

Some writers are so enthralled by ideas (one thinks of Doris Lessing) that their characters become debaters, and their fables approach allegory.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

For me, literature is a complex game, both mental and concrete, which is acted out in a physical manner on the page.

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

The materials of the novelist must be real; they must be gathered from the field of humanity by his actual observation.

The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head - it has the same shape as the human brain.

I read a lot of fiction.

I think it's Jerry's masterful fiction writing.

You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.

Writing fiction, there are no limits to what you write as long as it increases the value of the paper you are writing on.

Fiction has a unique role in conveying Truth. In fact, only fiction that is Truth with a capital T is worthwhile.

I just don't think I'm very good at fiction.

When you do fiction, it is your imagination you have put out there.

The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

Authors make stuff up. Let's not pretend it's any more magical than that.

I think one of the battles for fiction writers is how much to invent or exaggerate.

I like to read fiction.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.