Hilary Mantel Quotes

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.

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

[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.

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

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.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.

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.

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.

In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.

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

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

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

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.

I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.

[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date.

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.

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.

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.