Quote

It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.

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
Life
Follows
Whereas
Grandmother
Lives
Mother
Around
Become
Distinct
Women
Phases

More quotes by 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.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
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Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
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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.
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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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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
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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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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.
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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.
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I believe this was [Margaret Thatcher] estimate of the voter: These people are so stupid that they will vote for me because they think I know how to run the household.
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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
Hilary Mantel