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.
The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.
A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
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.
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.
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.
What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy. . . " 469
[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
One of the ideals [Margaret Thatcher] grew up with was self-denial and postponement of gratification, and yet she went about to create a greedy, short-term society. It is a paradox.
The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
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.