Hilary Mantel Quotes
-
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
-
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
-
You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.
-
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
-
A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
-
She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
-
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.
-
So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
-
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
-
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way Margaret Thatcher did.
-
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.
-
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
-
[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
-
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.
-
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."