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'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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Computers will be able to do all the mundane tasks in our daily lives.
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What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
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America's greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.
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When I was a child, a lot of my time was spent in Scotland because my mother's Scottish, and we used to go up to Ayrshire and visit relations in a place called Dalry.
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'Weasels - and stoats - and foxes - and so on. They're all right in a way - I'm very good friends with them - pass the time of day when we meet, and all that - but they break out sometimes, there's no denying it, and then - well, you can't really trust them, and that's the fact.'
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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.
