Best 273 quotes of Hilary Mantel on MyQuotes

Hilary Mantel

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    Hilary Mantel

    And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?

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    Hilary Mantel

    A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

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    Hilary Mantel

    A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

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    Hilary Mantel

    Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

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    Hilary Mantel

    Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.

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    Hilary Mantel

    Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

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    Hilary Mantel

    Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

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    Hilary Mantel

    For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

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    Hilary Mantel

    For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

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    Hilary Mantel

    For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

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    Hilary Mantel

    For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

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    Hilary Mantel

    God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

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    Hilary Mantel

    He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world.

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    Hilary Mantel

    He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

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    Hilary Mantel

    He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?

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    Hilary Mantel

    Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

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    Hilary Mantel

    History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    [H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    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.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

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    Hilary Mantel

    Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

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    Hilary Mantel

    Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.

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    Hilary Mantel

    I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

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    Hilary Mantel

    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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    Hilary Mantel

    In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.

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    Hilary Mantel

    Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.