Quote

I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.

Hilary Mantel

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Giving
Margaret
Going
Report
Years
Reports
Would
Fifty
Think
Another
Thinking
Give
Preliminary
Take
Wrecked
Country
Thatcher

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

Image
She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
Hilary Mantel
Image
My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
Hilary Mantel
Image
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
Hilary Mantel
Image
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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
Image
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel
Image
[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
Hilary Mantel
Image
By the tits of Holy Agnes
Hilary Mantel
Image
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel
Image
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.
Hilary Mantel