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

Hilary Mantel

Between Bit Book Collage Common Construct Description Dialogue Different Elaborate Here Holds How Isolated Know Like Lines Make Metaphor Myself Narrative Object Only Running Scrap Threads Together Way Which

Related Quotes

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.

— Hilary Mantel

lacememorythreads

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

— Hilary Mantel

BetweenDifferentDrawn

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

— Hilary Mantel

DelayImaginationMake

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

— Hilary Mantel

DiscardHistorianInterpret

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

— Hilary Mantel

BookCollectorContents