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

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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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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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This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
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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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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.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
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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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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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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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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
Hilary Mantel
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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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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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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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As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
Hilary Mantel
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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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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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