Quote

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

Hilary Mantel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Past
Littles
Little
Retell
Every
Changing
Always
Changes
Time
Behinds
Behind
History

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

Image
She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
Hilary Mantel
Image
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel
Image
It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel
Image
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
Hilary Mantel
Image
Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel
Image
By the tits of Holy Agnes
Hilary Mantel
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel
Image
I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
Hilary Mantel
Image
It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel