Hilary Mantel Quotes
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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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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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.
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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 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 can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way Margaret Thatcher did.
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Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
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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."
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
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Margaret Thatcher admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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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.
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I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.
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For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But Margaret Thatcher carried it to extremes.
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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The heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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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.
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When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
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I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that Margaret Thatcher wrecked this country.
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I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
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This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
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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.
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Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.