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[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

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
Margaret
Housewife
Prudent
Knew
Talking
Always
Thatcher

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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
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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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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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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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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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You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
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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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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
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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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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
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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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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.
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History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
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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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Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.
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The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
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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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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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