Quote

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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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
Enough
Subconscious
Work
Gaps
Make
Privilege
Would
Filled
Think
Research
Thinking
Imagination
Procrastination
Comes
Emerge
Used
Delay

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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.
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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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But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
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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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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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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
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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.
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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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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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 am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
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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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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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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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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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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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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?
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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