Hilary Mantel Quotes

I think writers like to see how people bring their words to life, and it's always surprising. Always, no matter what, whether it's good or bad, it's always surprising because a whole human being is coming to that piece of writing.

Dreams say what they mean, but they don't say it in daytime language.

Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.

You have to be open to dreaming. It's a complicated language, but I'm obsessed with it.

Fairy tales cross generational lines, and how you respond to them depends on when in your life you're seeing them.

Think how different it is to experience a word than a sound. When you're hearing a singer, you're controlled by the words, because you understand the language, you know what they're talking about, and you're forced to think about what they're talking about. But when you're hearing that same thing without a word, you're free to wander.

When you're a child, the colors are brighter, sounds are louder and whatever.

When you draw, you copy the world don't you? You remake it on paper, but it isn't the same. It's yours. No one else could have created it just like that. When I make poems, I use the words we all use, but the order and the sound create a new power. This wood is someone's creation. We stumble through it's tendrils, as if we're crawling through the synapses of his mind.

I think your imagination is your reality

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

The imagination and the place that dreams come from is so huge and so important. I'm trying to write about the real world, in that I'm trying to write about whatever it is the experience that makes us human, the things that we have in common.

Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous.

Dreams are more real than reality itself, they're closer to the self.

I lived, particularly in childhood but with lessening intensity right on to middle age, in a world that was peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes and places qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror for which there was no external evidence visible or plausible to others. My world was peopled with mysteries, seductive hints, vague menaces, "intimations of immortality.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

A writer's subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there.

To have a childhood means to live a thousand lives before the one.

"Do little pink fairies sing and dance in your world, Peabody?" "Sometimes, when it's very quiet and no one else can see."

I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.

It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.

The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses.

It lies around us like a cloud- A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye May bring us there to be.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

My head is my favorite swimming pool.