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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.

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
Fiction
Pegged
Probably
Literary
True
Novels
Didn
Wrote
Past
Historical
People
England
Certainly
Novel

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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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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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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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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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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?' He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.
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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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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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The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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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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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel