Dame Hilary Mary Mantel, DBE FRSL (/mænˈtɛl/ man-TEL; born Thompson, 6 July 1952), is an English writer whose work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction.
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
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.
I think the monarchy today 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.
I think it is going to take another fifty years for the report to be in. If I were to give a preliminary report, I would say that [Margaret Thatcher] wrecked this country.
One of the frustrations of someone like Thomas Cromwell is that, before they step into the light of history, and become extremely well documented, they are not known. A king might be well documented but not everyone.
Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.
It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
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.
I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.
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?
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.
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.
What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.
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.
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.