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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.
Hilary Mantel -
Margaret Thatcher admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
Hilary Mantel
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel -
Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
Hilary Mantel -
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel -
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.
Hilary Mantel
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If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel -
I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.
Hilary Mantel -
I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way Margaret Thatcher did.
Hilary Mantel -
Margaret Thatcher was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel -
So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
Hilary Mantel -
The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
Hilary Mantel -
It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
Hilary Mantel -
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.
Hilary Mantel -
The heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel -
Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
Hilary Mantel -
Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
Hilary Mantel -
I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
Hilary Mantel