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If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.

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
Writing
Books
Burnett
Feeling
Compton
Morning
Ivy
Write
Mechanism
Feelings
Puts
Next
Pick
Back
Picks
Book
Broken

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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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.'
Hilary Mantel
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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
Hilary Mantel
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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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[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing.
Hilary Mantel
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
Hilary Mantel
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By the tits of Holy Agnes
Hilary Mantel
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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
Hilary Mantel
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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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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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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Memory isn't a theme it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
Hilary Mantel
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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.
Hilary Mantel
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When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
Hilary Mantel