Quote

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?

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
Running
Mark
Littles
Looked
Little
Painting
Right
Boys
Gregory
Like
Says
Murderer
Heard
Runs
Turns
George
Fear
Silly

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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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
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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.
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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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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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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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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.
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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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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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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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When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Hilary Mantel
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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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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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[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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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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If the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. The monarchy is mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel