Hilary Mantel Quotes
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I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
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For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.
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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
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A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
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You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.
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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
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Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. Margaret Thatcher takes away the nourishment of the nation.
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Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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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.
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We have a number of very powerful women in the world now - Mrs. Angela Merkel, who the Germans call Mutti. What did we call Mrs. Margaret Thatcher? When she was minister of education, she stopped the children's free school milk. This may sound quaint, but after the war we were such a malnourished nation that part of the founding of the welfare state were public health initiatives. Every little schoolchild got milk. Mrs. Thatcher stopped it. They called her "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher."
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Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed? Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, one you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.
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When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.
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Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.
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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations on Thomas Cromwell will have a root somewhere.
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And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.
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I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.