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"Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel."
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"What I'd show you is much more bizarre than anything we have looked at so far, and I warn you in advance that the first impulse will be to laugh. That's all right. Laugh if you must. Just don't take your eye off what you see, for even in your imagination, here is a creature who can do you damage."
"Novelists are basically inviting their readers to play a game of pretend. That's what fiction is: a game of pretend."
"Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets."
"A man walked across the moors from Razorback to Lancre town without seeing a single marshlight, head-less dog, strolling tree, ghostly coach or comet, and had to be taken in by a tavern and given a drink to unsteady his nerves."
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
"A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning."
"Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn't exist."
"Uh...are we going to talk about what just happened?" Victoria asked as Drake stepped over to Finn's desk to look at the map layout of the cemetery, seemingly calm about the fact that Bo and Nyx had just disappeared into thin air."
"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."
Explore more quotes by Hilary Mantel
"For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood."
"Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be."
"If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient. [25 February 2010]"
"Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind."
"No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog."
"The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt- sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: "Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now."
"Those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand."
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