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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
Fake
Couldn
Quality
Class
Mind
Thatcher
Margaret
Background
Backgrounds

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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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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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Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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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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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
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If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
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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.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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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] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist.
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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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At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
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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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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
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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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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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