Hilary Mantel Quotes

I have a penchant for fresh notebooks and mechanical pencils. It seems every time I go to the store, I buy a new notebook. I have dozens of them just sitting around.

It became my solace. Because it's the only thing structured in my life right now. Training is sort of a therapy session, I guess.

Your house is all about routine, not the unexpected events of your life.

I'm a total stationery fiend - I have drawers and drawers of lovely printed cards and wrapping paper.

I am very disciplined in my life and very up front. It is the only way I can do it and do it well. I am up every day at 7, and I feed my kids, no matter how long the day was.

For pragmatic reasons, I love the routine. I love the structure of it. I love knowing that my days are free. I know where I'm going at night. I know my life is kind of orderly. I just like that better.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities.

#3 pencils and quadrille pads.

Baseball is the only thing beside the paper clip that hasn't changed

I believe life is constantly testing us for our level of commitment, and life's greatest rewards are reserved for those who demonstrate a never-ending commitment to act until they achieve. This level of resolve can move mountains, but it must be constant and consistent. As simplistic as this may sound, it is still the common denominator separating those who live their dreams from those who live in regret.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?

Went to the paper shop - it had blown away.

Life's so full that you just take it one day at a time.

He knows that you have to laugh at the things that hurt you just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.

It is the task of the architect to give life a gentler structure.

There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it [life]. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope.

The worst in life, we are told, is compatible with the best in art. So too the worst in life is compatible with the best in humour.

Take it from me, there's nothing like a job well done, except the quiet enveloping darkness at the bottom of a bottle of Jim Beam after a job done any way at all.

To create something beautiful about despair or out of a feeling of despair is for me the most hopeful life affirming thing a person can do

I have often wondered how they manage to get return envelopes which miss, by one-quarter of an inch, fitting the blank you are supposed to return. They say, "Please fill out and return the enclosed envelope," and the enclosed envelope is always one-quarter of an inch too small.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, to place it in the world.

A body without bones would be a limp impossible mess, so a day without steady routine would be disruptive and chaotic.

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice.