Quote

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

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
Make
Words
Things
Happens
Like
Power
Utmost
World
Find
Spells
People
Real
Testing
Writing
Laws
Work
Happen
Believe
Law

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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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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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[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.
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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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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
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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 would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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 am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
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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.
Hilary Mantel