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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
Islands
Rise
Conservative
Begin
Talk
Story
Hackles
Stories
Deluded
People
Island

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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 all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
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Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
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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 not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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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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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 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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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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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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I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
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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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Those who are made can be unmade.
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For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.
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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 would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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