Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.”

— Hilary Mantel

2. “Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”

— Hilary Mantel

Featured in: Book Quotes, Reading Quotes, Quotes About Stories

3. “But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it.”

— Hilary Mantel

4. “A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.”

— Hilary Mantel

5. “In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career – writing – that could accommodate being ill.”

— Hilary Mantel

6. “Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.”

— Hilary Mantel

7. “By the hairy balls of Jesus.”

— Hilary Mantel

8. “Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people’s thoughts.”

— Hilary Mantel

9. “History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved to organize our ignorance of the past. It is the record of what’s left on the record... It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey.”

— Hilary Mantel

10. “You’re only young once, they say, but doesn’t it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.”

— Hilary Mantel

11. “Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.”

— Hilary Mantel

12. “The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”

— Hilary Mantel

13. “History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.”

— Hilary Mantel

14. “This is what life does for you in the end; it arranges a fight you can’t win.”

— Hilary Mantel

15. “Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth,” he says, “set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be.”

— Hilary Mantel

16. “It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.”

— Hilary Mantel

17. “For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.”

— Hilary Mantel

18. “A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.”

— Hilary Mantel

19. “You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.”

— Hilary Mantel

20. “Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.”

— Hilary Mantel

21. “By the tits of Holy Agnes.”

— Hilary Mantel

22. “For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.”

— Hilary Mantel

23. “If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.”

— Hilary Mantel

24. “Beneath every history, another history.”

— Hilary Mantel

25. “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.”

— Hilary Mantel

26. “Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.”

— Hilary Mantel

27. “Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.”

— Hilary Mantel

28. “My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash.”

— Hilary Mantel

29. “At New Year’s he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.”

— Hilary Mantel

30. “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.”

— Hilary Mantel

31. “Those who think a heart cannot break have led blessed and sheltered lives.”

— Hilary Mantel

32. “Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write.” The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of gold, and its pages are edged in gilt, so that it blazes in the light. Its clasps are studded with blackish garnets, smooth, translucent. “I hardly dare open it,” the boy says. “Please. You will like it.” It is Summa de Arithmetica. He unclasps it to find a woodcut of the author with a book before him, and a pair of compasses.”

— Hilary Mantel

33. “So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?”

— Hilary Mantel

34. “I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.”

— Hilary Mantel

35. “Like every writer, I’m drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.”

— Hilary Mantel

36. “I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.”

— Hilary Mantel

37. “He had meant to write to Gregory and say, I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can marry her. He has not written this. In his present precarious situation, it would be about as useful as the letters Gregory used to write to him: Dear father, I hope you are well. I hope your dog is well. And now no more for lack of time.”

— Hilary Mantel

38. “I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.”

— Hilary Mantel

39. “Hindsight is the historian’s necessary vice.”

— Hilary Mantel

40. “Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure, so deep and subtle he does not know he is lying; he thinks he is the most truthful of princes.”

— Hilary Mantel

41. “You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.”

— Hilary Mantel

42. “What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?”

— Hilary Mantel

43. “We are all dying, just at different speeds.”

— Hilary Mantel

44. “History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.”

— Hilary Mantel

45. “Those who are made can be unmade.”

— Hilary Mantel

46. “It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.′ She laughs. ‘They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.”

— Hilary Mantel

47. “It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

— Hilary Mantel

48. “You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”

— Hilary Mantel

49. “There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.”

— Hilary Mantel

50. “But Christendom was overturned for the Boleyn marriage, to put the ginger pig in the cradle;.”

— Hilary Mantel