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

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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
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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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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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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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Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
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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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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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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 can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
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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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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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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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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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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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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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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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