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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.

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
Voters
Vote
Stupid
Running
Thatcher
Believe
Voter
Think
Margaret
Thinking
Estimate
People
Household

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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.
Hilary Mantel
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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
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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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Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
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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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By the tits of Holy Agnes
Hilary Mantel
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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.
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
Hilary Mantel
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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Hilary Mantel
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
Hilary Mantel
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
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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No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
Hilary Mantel
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel
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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
Hilary Mantel
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel