Hilary Mantel Quotes
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Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.
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You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
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He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
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A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.
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It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of... It's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really, really mess up your life.
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Margaret Thatcher assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.
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'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
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If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of Ivy Compton-Burnett books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
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People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.
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History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
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As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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One of the ideals Margaret Thatcher grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.
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A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.
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Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.
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What Margaret Thatcher made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
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To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about Margaret Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.
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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
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To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - Thomas More burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.