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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?

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

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
Hilary Mantel
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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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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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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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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
Hilary Mantel
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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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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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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.
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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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What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.
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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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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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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My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
Hilary Mantel
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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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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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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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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.
Hilary Mantel