A Quote by Hilary Mantel

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. — © Hilary Mantel
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.
I have never understood the saying 'To think outside the box.' Why would anyone sit inside of a box and then think outside of it. Rather just get out of the box.
There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.
I never say never to anything. I don't really think it would be for me, but I never put limitations on myself. Part of getting older is acceptance, though, so I'd like to think I'll age gracefully. But if other women get confi dence from having surgery, then I would never judge.
America had shifted from what influential cultural historian Warren Susman called a culture of character to a culture of personality, and opened up a Pandora's box of personal anxieties of which we would never recover.
I do not think that there is any doubt about where I stand in respect to boycotts. If there is, I will just state what I think about them. They are illegal and ought to be suppressed. I would never countenance that which recognizes their legality.
I never set out to become 'famous.' I mean, when you're 14 you think 'I'm gonna become a writer and people will want my autograph and that'll be cool,' but you grow up and you learn that's just not how the world works. I resigned myself to the fact that I would probably never be published and if I did it probably wouldn't be a big deal.
I think in the end, when you're famous, people like to narrow you down to a few personality traits. I think I've just become this ambitious, say-whatever's-on-her-mind, intimidating person. And that's part of my personality, but it's certainly not anywhere near the whole thing.
I'm a huge, huge comic book fan. I love the superhero movies so much. If I had to be one of the Avengers, I would go with Thor. I would have to. I just think I look the part too much, and I'm a fan of all of them, but Thor would be something that I think I could put on. I think I could make it happen.
I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.
You can think whatever you want to and laugh, but I believe if I would have never learned to put my stuff back on the right grocery store shelves, and I would have never learned to put my cart back where God told me to, I don't believe I would be standing here today preaching this message to you. And I think there are literally millions of people who miss the will of God for their life because they think little things don't make any difference.
If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.
I think the hearing loss started with 'Bonanza.' Sometimes the director would put us in a box canyon and have us fire our guns. The sound would really reverberate in a box canyon. It took me a long time to realize what was coming on me.
I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.
Once I began college, I was committed to writing, which I think is different from saying I wanted to become a writer. I knew I would always write; I just wasn't always sure how I would go about doing so.
I don't think I anticipated supporting myself as a writer... I expected I would have to be a teacher or a journalist, that I wouldn't just write full time. It's such a part of my life, and in some ways, it's a very unromantic part of my life. It's almost, to me, like breathing. I don't think about whether I like it or not.
The weirdest thing to me is that magazines would never do this for their writers. They would never hire a writer who writes for another magazine; they want to have their own stable of writers. Newsweek would never hire a TIME writer, and TIME would never hire a Newsweek writer - but they would both hire the same photographer to shoot a cover for them.
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