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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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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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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.
Hilary Mantel
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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.'
Hilary Mantel
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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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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.
Hilary Mantel
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I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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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For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
Hilary Mantel
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My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
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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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel