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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

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
Like
Household
Pretending
Wasn
Knew
Running
True
Thatcher
Country

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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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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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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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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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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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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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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This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.
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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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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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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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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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If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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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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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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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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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If the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. The monarchy is mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting.
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
Hilary Mantel