Hilary Mantel quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Hilary Mantel on Wise Famous Quotes.

He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money sticks to yours hands.
No, It passes through them, alas.

Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?

'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.

You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

Some debts should never be tallied, he says. I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'"
"He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face.

No rational man could worship a God so simply vengeful

Because Islam doesn't, he said, his voice toneless,

Arrange your face

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.

Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

An elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant.

The Revolution has got frozen up. They have frozen it up with their talk of moderation. To stand still in Revolution is to slip backwards.

If your going to be ugly it is well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.

I can't divide Camille's loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.

When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again

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

For a young reader that's an important moment, when you recognize that your self exists in the world and that your self exists in literature.

I daresay something will happen, between now and '91, to make your fortunes look up.

Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.

No son wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.

Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.

Paper reassures me, its touch. It's what you respect.

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

May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into "permanent session" - what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term!

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

What for do we nail down the dead?

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

There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins.

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause, a caesura.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.

distraught. It seems he claims

Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.

In these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine, mutable, sly.

It's not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb.

By the tits of Holy Agnes

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on.

Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.

Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.

I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.

Martyr More,' he says. 'The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints.

Why doesn't Yasmin distinguish ... between private morality and public order?

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better.

And they say [money's] the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.

Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?" "Ah," the cardinal says, entering into the problem. "To her face, 'my lady.

Render me the texture of flesh. Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice, that marks out the living from the dead.

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles.

Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife. When they have listened

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

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

Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading.

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

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

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

peroration. He had left his opponents with nothing to say and nowhere to

Oh, you are not disappointing," Henry says. "But the moment you are, I will let you know.

Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!

Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due.

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.

They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks.

In a generation everything can change.

I tell you, dear Citizen Camille - it's not the deaths I can't stand. It's the judgements, the judgements in the courtroom.

The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you.

There is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it.
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They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs.

What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?"
- "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough."

- Hilary Mantel

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.

Told me if I did not smell of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan.

Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.

crenellations, the scarlet and the pale, the airy stone and the

We don't have to invite pain in.It's waiting for us:sooner than later

His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.

he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit.

I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was: if only because I did not know anything.

God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation.

Anne says, "It is all about me.

If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.

you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

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