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

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
Story
Stories
Also
Experienced
Remember
Critical
Ever
Aware
Without
Judging
Self
Reader
Reading

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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 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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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.
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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
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The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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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.
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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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.
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When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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