Hilary Mantel Quotes
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You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
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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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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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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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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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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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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When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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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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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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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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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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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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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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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting than monarchy.
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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'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 once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.
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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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Margaret Thatcher was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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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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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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Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.