Hilary Mantel Quotes
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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 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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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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When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But Margaret Thatcher carried it to extremes.
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Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
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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 loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.
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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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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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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.