Quote

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.

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
Things
Aside
Thatcher
Like
Understood
Rally
Enemy
Margaret
Community
Altruism
Nature
Identification
Around
Greedy
Play
Collectives
Acquisitive
Made
Collective
Slay

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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.
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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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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
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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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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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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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[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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