A Quote by Hilary Mantel

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

Hilary Mantel

Quote Topics

Became Because Become Chance Had Historian Missed Novelist Only Thought

Quote Author

Hilary Mantel
English - Writer
Born: July 6, 1952

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

Joseph Conrad

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

Philippa Gregory

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

William Landay

I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly I'd be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian. She is intelligent, she is bright, she is an admirable writer. I happen to find her Tudor novels unreadable, but that's because I am a Tudor historian.

David Starkey

When I was a kid, it was so important to listen only to bands nobody had ever heard of. I missed out on so much interesting music because of my need to listen to a psychobilly band that only two people knew about... Because I thought I was cool.

Andy Biersack

A couple years ago, the novelist Russell Banks told me he was reading the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. I asked why. He said, 'Because I've always wanted to and am tired of having my reading assigned.' I thought it was a marvelous declaration of independence.

Richard Russo

My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.

Ghassan Kanafani

The novelist's obligation to remake the sensuous texture of a vanished world is also the historian's. The strongest fiction writers often do deep research to make the thought and utterances of lost time credible.

Simon Schama

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

Peter Ackroyd

If you don't laugh at all, you've missed the point. If you only laugh, you've missed your chance from illumination.

Robert Anton Wilson

Nothing could be left to chance, because chance, after all, can be dangerous. But what I didn't realize all that time, what I missed all along, is that chance is everywhere. It's also what life is made of. It's all around us, but most of the time we never see it working.

Jessi Kirby

The Savior isn't our last chance; He is our only chance. Our only chance to overcome self-doubt and catch a vision of who we may become. Our only chance to repent and have our sins washed clean.