Hilary Mantel Quotes
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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.
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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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He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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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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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
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When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
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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 am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But Margaret Thatcher carried it to extremes.
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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 do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
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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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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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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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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 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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If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
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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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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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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.