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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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
People
Fears
Desires
Absence
Fantasy
Frightens
Open
Fantasies
Knowledge
Pour
Desire
Anticipation
Facts
Gaps
More quotes by Hilary Mantel
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.
Hilary Mantel
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
Hilary Mantel
If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.
Hilary Mantel
[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.
Hilary Mantel
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
Hilary Mantel
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.
Hilary Mantel
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
To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.
Hilary Mantel
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.
Hilary Mantel
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Hilary Mantel
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Hilary Mantel
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
My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
Hilary Mantel
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.
Hilary Mantel
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
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
Hilary Mantel
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
I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
