Hilary Mantel Quotes

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

We think of stories a lot of the time as being horizontal texts, beginning to end. But I love the idea of having little vertical spikes in the story, too.

I'm very interested in structure, how multiple stories are assembled in different ways; that is what memory does as well.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

Although this is a fictitious story the history is real. You don't want to re-write history but you certainly want to portray events and characters as realistically as you can.

My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

You're playing a character in a drama who happens to be based on someone who existed. It's never going to 'be' that person, but it's based on someone well-known, and you want to create enough of that person for it not to be a distraction.

Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall,' which blew the top of my head straight off. I've read it three times, and I'm still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.

Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story.

One decision I made in writing 'Henry and Clara' was that I would keep Lincoln's appearances and any dialogue by him to an absolute minimum, because I think readers don't quite believe it when novelists have Lincoln walking around and saying things. They just know they're in the presence of stage machinery.

One of the interesting things about 'Saw' is that you don't find out about things in sequential or linear order. One of the things that fans have liked a lot is, we don't forget about details. They come back and reveal themselves as the story evolves.

You can't tell a story linearly if you want people to understand.

I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare's political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.

I don't read a lot of fiction, but one of my favorite authors is William Kennedy; his books, to me, almost read like historical dramas because the mythologies are so detailed as he wove fiction with the factual history of Albany.

I was fortunate enough to do an HBO show, 'Rome,' in which my arc was built in by historical fact, and over the course of 22 episodes, we were able to tell the stories of these people. We had a beginning and middle and end, and as we went on, you changed every week.

Historical novels are hard to do for the general public for commercial writers like myself.

Sarah Phelps is such an incredibly detailed writer. She's famous for bringing literature to life, like Dickens and Agatha Christie.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

I love being educated by historical novels.

Research is the historical novelist's map, constraint, and purest energy.

You spend so much time as a writer telling straight and linear stories.

Normally, if I would read in a script that there's mostly flashbacks and mostly voiceover, I would run as far away as possible.