Hilary Mantel Quotes

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

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.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

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.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

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.

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.

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

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.

God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

Those who are made can be unmade.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

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.

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

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.

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.

I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.