When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered. Hilary Mantel More Quotes by Hilary Mantel More Quotes From Hilary Mantel I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line. Hilary Mantel lines party careers Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. Hilary Mantel historical real people Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation. Hilary Mantel milk imagine firsts I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes. Hilary Mantel clever mistake book Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives. Hilary Mantel skulls space book By the tits of Holy Agnes Hilary Mantel holy I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did. Hilary Mantel males hate thinking The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world. Hilary Mantel attitude trying thinking This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way. Hilary Mantel peculiar ideas thinking 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 blue order people [Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother! Hilary Mantel daughter mother father 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. Hilary Mantel book lying school 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 together running book 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. Hilary Mantel historical-novels writing years [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. Hilary Mantel entry mother knows 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. Hilary Mantel input taste fiction 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. Hilary Mantel lasts facts ideas 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. Hilary Mantel crush pride men It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells. Hilary Mantel jokes Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. Hilary Mantel chronology memories way
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