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[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.

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
Background
Backgrounds
Fake
Couldn
Quality
Class
Mind
Thatcher
Margaret

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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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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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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The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
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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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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
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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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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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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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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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The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
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I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.
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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.
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.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
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.
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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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I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
Hilary Mantel