Hilary Mantel Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings 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.
No, It passes through them, alas.
'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.
Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.
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.
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.
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.
He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.
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.
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.
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.
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.
Fortitude ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
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.
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.
What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?"
- "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough."
- Hilary Mantel
- "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough."
- Hilary Mantel
Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.
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.