Hilary Mantel Quotes
-
My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
-
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.
-
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
-
Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.
-
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
-
Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. Margaret Thatcher takes away the nourishment of the nation.
-
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."
-
The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
-
When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn't feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn't one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not.
-
You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.
-
Margaret Thatcher aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
-
At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
-
When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
-
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
-
I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
-
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
-
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
-
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
-
He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?
-
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
-
Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.
-
You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.
-
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.
-
A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.