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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.

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
Talk
Story
Hackles
Stories
Deluded
People
Island
Islands
Rise
Conservative
Begin

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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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By the tits of Holy Agnes
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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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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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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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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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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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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 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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When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.
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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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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.
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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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My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
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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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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
Hilary Mantel
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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
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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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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
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