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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.
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
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More quotes by Hilary Mantel
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel
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
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
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Hilary Mantel
No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
Hilary Mantel
[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
Hilary Mantel
The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
Hilary Mantel
Those who are made can be unmade.
Hilary Mantel
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
[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
Hilary Mantel
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Hilary Mantel
When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
Hilary Mantel
In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
Hilary Mantel
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
Hilary Mantel
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.
Hilary Mantel
I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
Hilary Mantel
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
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
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Hilary Mantel