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'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

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
Years
Halls
Rules
Late
Show
Shows
Wolf
Firsts
Desk
First
Desks
Writing
Hall

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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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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 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.
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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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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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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.
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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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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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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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My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
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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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To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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