Quotes from Hilary Mantel

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.

Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns.

The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.

When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life.

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow.

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs.

When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.