Hilary Mantel Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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Margaret Thatcher aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
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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.
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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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.
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I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.
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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.
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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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A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
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Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
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I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
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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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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.