Hilary Mantel Quotes
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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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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I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.
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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 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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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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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 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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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.
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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 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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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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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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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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Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
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Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
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The heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.
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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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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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I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.
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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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For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.