It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.
— Hilary Mantel
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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.
My first two novels were very black comedies.
I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing.
When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.
I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
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.
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.
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.
It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.
Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled.
Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
