Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Writing’s like that – the next ball can always catch you out.” - Interviewed in the Guardian in 2021. It doesn’t matter how many centuries you’ve scored in the past, you can fail in the next innings. I bet quite a few of us could knock off a Martin Amis.” – Mantel, a former Booker prize judge and twice winner, talking to the Sydney Morning Herald about the idea of the prize being judged blind. It might work for first-novel prizes but people do tend to develop distinctive voices, and of course it might lead to mischievous writers imitating each other. Well, let’s put it this way if it was the third volume, if it was a book about Thomas Cromwell, I think they would know it is me and to be honest if the judges just couldn’t pick the authors, I wouldn’t think very much of their literary acumen. It’s lovely that people have the appetite for it but considering the pace at which I proceed, I would like some life before it’s too late.” – Talking to the Edinburgh international books festival in 2020 after publishing the final instalment of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. I think that’s quite important to say, so I hope people will stop writing to me with suggestions. I haven’t got another big historical novel in view. A book grows according to a subtle and deep-laid plan. I might spend a week threading an image through a story, but moving the narrative not an inch. I may have a dozen versions of a single scene. But fiction makes me the servant of a process that has no clear beginning and end or method of measuring achievement. Writing lectures or reviews – any kind of non-fiction – seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshal your resources, just get on with it. This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves. Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day. And when I think: what do I retain from the old days? It’s a turn of phrase.” – Interviewed in the Observer in 2003. But it was never an escape, nor was it the place I was running to – because it wasn’t a refuge – but it was what enabled me, it was my source of power and it was all I’d got and it was the cheapest source of power. Because all you need is paper and pencil and you can do it horizontal. The only way I could think of was by writing. I thought: I am a wreck and have no money and am in poor health – and so how am I going to impose myself on the world? I was seethingly ambitious, I don’t make any secret of that.
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