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

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The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
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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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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
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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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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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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 concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
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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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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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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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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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If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to music, meditate, exercise whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be.
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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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