Hilary Mantel Quotes
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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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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.
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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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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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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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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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Margaret Thatcher admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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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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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way Margaret Thatcher did.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
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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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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 loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.
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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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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 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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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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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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What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with Margaret Thatcher is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.
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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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Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
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I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.