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

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.
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[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.
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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
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As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
Hilary Mantel
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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.
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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.
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
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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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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.
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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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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
Hilary Mantel
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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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 am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Hilary Mantel
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Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Hilary Mantel