Hilary Mantel Quotes
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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.
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It was unfortunate for other women who might come after Margaret Thatcher that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.
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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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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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When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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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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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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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.
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I will get into trouble, I am sure, because since my Kate Middleton speech and before, certain papers were after me. I am not saying, however, that it would have been moral or right to assassinate Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, but I know it will be read that way. I know it will cause a problem.
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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.
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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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So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
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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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I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.
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I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
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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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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting than monarchy.
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In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
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The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is.
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I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.
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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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The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.