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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.

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
Catholics
Thomas
Catholic
Worship
Beyond
Goes

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I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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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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To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.
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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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Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.
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It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.
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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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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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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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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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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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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
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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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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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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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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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'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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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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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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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.
Hilary Mantel