Hilary Mantel Quotes
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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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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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A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
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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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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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Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
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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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It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
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You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
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Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
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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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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way Margaret Thatcher did.
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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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I believe this was Margaret Thatcher estimate of the voter: "These people are so stupid that they will vote for me because they think I know how to run the household."
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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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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
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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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So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
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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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He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world.