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

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.
Hilary Mantel
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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
Hilary Mantel
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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
Hilary Mantel
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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Hilary Mantel
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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
Hilary Mantel
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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
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.'
Hilary Mantel
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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Hilary Mantel
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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel