Hilary Mantel Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

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."

Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.

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

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

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

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].

Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't ­really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.

Those who are made can be unmade.

He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never there before. I didn't feel it was my history particularly, coming from Northern Britain, being of Irish extraction, being a cradle Catholic. The image of England I grew up with felt somewhere else. There was an official England in postcards, but it wasn't one I had visited. But I decided to march onto the center ground and occupy it whether it was mine or not.

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

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.

[Margaret Thatcher] is a woman who, when she wrote her entry for "Who's Who," didn't include her mother. Now whether that was corrected in subsequent editions, I do not know.

To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.

I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.

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

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.

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.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.