Hilary Mantel Quotes
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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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So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
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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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When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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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 am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
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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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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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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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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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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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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting than monarchy.
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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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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 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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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've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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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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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.