Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
Tags: like, ideas, journalism, facts

Other Quotes by "Hilary Mantel"

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.
Tags: your, book, time, 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.
Tags: just, never, think, personality
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.
Tags: connection, small, child, past
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.
Tags: think, happy, people, you
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
Tags: looking, world, yourself, you
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