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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

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
Hindsight
Historian
Vice
Vices
Necessary

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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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.
Hilary Mantel
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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
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What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.
Hilary Mantel
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I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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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If the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. The monarchy 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. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting.
Hilary Mantel
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My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
Hilary Mantel
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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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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
Hilary Mantel
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At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
Hilary Mantel
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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Hilary Mantel
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel
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If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
Hilary Mantel