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

Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 6
Essayist
Film Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Hilary Mary Thompson
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel
Make
Procrastination
Delay
Subconscious
Privilege
Imagination
Comes
Work

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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.
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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
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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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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.
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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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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.
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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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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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As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
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