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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.
Hilary Mantel -
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel -
It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
Hilary Mantel -
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel -
God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
Hilary Mantel -
You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel -
Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel -
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
Hilary Mantel -
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel
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In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.
Hilary Mantel -
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
Hilary Mantel -
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
Hilary Mantel -
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Hilary Mantel -
Those who are made can be unmade.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel
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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."
Hilary Mantel -
The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
Hilary Mantel -
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
Hilary Mantel -
I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But Margaret Thatcher carried it to extremes.
Hilary Mantel