Hilary Mantel Quotes

Nothing changes more constantly than the past

Every time we revise our history, we also revise the mythology of our history.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

History is always changing.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

Many try to force the past to change.

One duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

I think fiction recues history from its confusions.

Historians are prophets of the past, not of the future.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

To what a degree the same past can leave different marks - and especially admit of different interpretations.

There is always something rather absurd about the past.

Perspectives change.

I only remember the future.

History is easy to change.

Everybody rewrites history if he can.

History is the autobiography of a madman.

History is what we would make of it.

Time is something that interests me a whole lot - past and present, and how the past appears as people change.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.