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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

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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
Though
Osmosis
Often
Collector
House
Contents
Night
Collectors
Thought
Rainy
Book
Shelves
Many
Nights
Never
Winter
Seeped

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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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He turns to the painting. I fear Mark was right. Who is Mark? A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer. Gregory says, Did you not know?
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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 think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
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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.
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When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
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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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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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[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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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.
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.
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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 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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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
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