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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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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
Days
Sharp
Choices
Fathers
Mothers
Meatless
Father
Tongue
Winters
Mother
Winter
Severity
Past
Choice
Tongues
Cold
Endured
Proud
Attached

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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
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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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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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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.
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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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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
Hilary Mantel
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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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You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
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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
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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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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
Hilary Mantel
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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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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'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
Hilary Mantel