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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

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
Every
Operates
Assassination
Threat
Leader

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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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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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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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History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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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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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
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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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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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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.
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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
Hilary Mantel
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
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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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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.
Hilary Mantel
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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
Hilary Mantel
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
Hilary Mantel
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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
Hilary Mantel