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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.

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
Share
Lion
Used
Lions
Time
Joke
Mane
Thinking
Pull
Sporting
Like
King
Tamed
Jokes
Claws
Ears
Thomas
Kings
Merry

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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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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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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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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[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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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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The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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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.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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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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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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