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

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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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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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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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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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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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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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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.
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History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
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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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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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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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Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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