Hilary Mantel Ideas Quotations

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.

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.

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.