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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.

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
Careers
Knight
Involved
Knights
Boys
Ambitions
Either
Guard
Firsts
Intended
First
Turning
Ambition
Errant
Career
Railway

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You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
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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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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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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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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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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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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
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History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
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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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When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. 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.
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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.
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I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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