When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

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

If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change, it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.

Hilary Mantel Quotes