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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.

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
Things
Worse
Think
Idea
Thinking
Else
Thought
Seems
Ideas
Better
Camille
Way
Peculiar

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
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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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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.
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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
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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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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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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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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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My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
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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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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.
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
Hilary Mantel
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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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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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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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