Author

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

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

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

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.

From Hilary Mantel

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.

From Hilary Mantel