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

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To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.
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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.
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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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Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
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.
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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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In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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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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When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.
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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel
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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
Hilary Mantel
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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.
Hilary Mantel
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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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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
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To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.
Hilary Mantel
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What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
Hilary Mantel