Hilary Mantel (Dame Hilary Mary Mantel) Quotes
Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
Quotes to Explore
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It's different for every song. But for 'Say Something,' I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.
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I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.
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I've always gone for the more sensitive, bookish guy, totally. The jock boys, the sporty guys, I don't know... they just didn't do it for me.
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I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating.
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I have to admit that I can't take a whole fig and eat it on its own as I would a peach or mango. It's just too much.
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The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
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I like part-time jobs in restaurants.
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I don't subscribe to the idea that if you don't have the body you want, you can't be proud of the body you have. I think you can do both.
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What feels most productive to me isn't to think so much in terms of how I can be alternative, but how I can be subversive in a way that feels organic, how I can connect with people, and how I can just be myself, which may be the hardest thing to be.
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There is no correlation between a childhood success and a professional athlete.
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The middle class is so funny, it's the class I know best, and it's the class where you find the most pretension, so that's what makes the middle classes so funny.
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You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.
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Life is full of regrets, but it doesn't pay to look back.
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I am forever learning and changing.
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I'm not very good at sticking at things if I can't be successful at them. I gave up on sport a long time ago.
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Everyone in New York is very self-involved. They're focused on themselves. Like, walking down the street, people are just in their own zone.
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I watch a lot of television, for better or worse, and I am particularly interested in what Michael Moore brought up in 'Bowling for Columbine,' which is the idea that they're selling a narrative of fear.
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I feel like if I started to use it [camera] that way, it would be like a sin almost. I never show people ugly pictures I take of them. I usually destroy them. So even if I like it, and they don't, it doesn't get shown.
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Complex tasks are often better handled in the back of our mind, and that's often true of creative tasks - when you have something complex to deal with in writing or research or responding to an email. I'll start working, put it aside, and sometimes I'll wake up the next morning with a solution, or I'll find one when I exercise.
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The fad diets are doing way more harm than good.
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I do what I do because it seems to be critically missing in the world and I want to see it not-happen.
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It must be hard to be exclusively social and entirely friendless at the same time.
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Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
