Hilary Mantel Quotes

To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.

There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].

I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.

The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.

She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.

Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

Give me a book, ” she said. “A book of sermons, anything.”“What do you want a book for?”“I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose.

You know I'm not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king's servant.

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past

Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.

By the hairy balls of Jesus

He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.

Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.

For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as ‘the career women’s disease’. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it

When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.

The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. "Good-bye, " he said. "Georges-Jacques--study law. Law is a weapon.

I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.

I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.

How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.

... every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)

If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.

When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.

The gift blesses the giver.

It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.Pg.406

Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?

The prose, ” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.

Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.