Hilary Mantel Quotes

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer - whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

I have been writing since I was old enough to spell. I have never considered not writing.

The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

I started blogging a decade ago because I like blogging. Writing's a kind of lonely thing to do, and I liked the idea of demystifying the process because I loved it as a kid and teenager and as somebody who wanted desperately to write.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Everyone thinks when they start writing that they can't do it. I was lucky. My sister Delia was the most important person in terms of encouraging me.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

Sometimes writing has to be forced. In starting out, the shape and timbre and texture of what is to come is an uncertain chimera shimmering from behind a veil. You must not wait, loiter, dilly-dally. You must force your way painfully through.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

I wanted to write.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.

Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.