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

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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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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
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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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For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
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The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
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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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Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.
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Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
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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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It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.
Hilary Mantel
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Hilary Mantel
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If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Hilary Mantel
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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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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