Hilary Mantel Quotes & Sayings

I can't divide Camille's loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice. — Hilary Mantel

Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne's rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner. — Hilary Mantel

I was just going over London Bridge and I saw someone had attacked the Madonna's statue. Knocked off the baby's head.'
'That was done a while back. It would be that devil Cranmer. You know what he is when he's taken a drink. — Hilary Mantel

Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck.
512 — Hilary Mantel

Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you. — Hilary Mantel

Suppose he found that persistent unsparing voice at his elbow one day, claiming that Danton lacked probity; he had an answer, pat, not a logical one, but one sufficiently chilling to put logic in abeyance. To question Danton's patriotism was to cast in doubt the whole Revolution. A tree is known by its fruits, and Danton made August 10. First he made the republic of the Cordeliers, then he made the Republic of France. If Danton is not a patriot, then we have been criminally negligent in the nation's affairs. If Danton is not a patriot, we are not patriots either. If Danton is not a patriot, then the whole thing - from May '89 - must be done again. — Hilary Mantel

Straight is the line of Duty, Curved is the line of Beauty, Follow the straight line, thou shall see. The curved line ever follow thee. — Hilary Mantel

Not a word, not a word of love, Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all, He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch. — Hilary Mantel

It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. — Hilary Mantel

The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turn-off, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. — Hilary Mantel

Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were? — Hilary Mantel

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this? — Hilary Mantel

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished. — Hilary Mantel

I believe it's fine to give up books even after a page; there's so much to read in the world that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain? — Hilary Mantel

In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.
472 — Hilary Mantel

The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true. — Hilary Mantel

For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood. — Hilary Mantel

In a generation everything can change. — Hilary Mantel

[T]here comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing. — Hilary Mantel

All colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge. — Hilary Mantel

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people. — Hilary Mantel

What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?"
- "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough."

- Hilary Mantel — Hilary Mantel

I don't grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness - their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favorable to Rome. Henry appears to look straight through him, — Hilary Mantel

Arrange your face — Hilary Mantel

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it. — Hilary Mantel

Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, has put his signature first on all the articles against Wolsey. They say one strange allegation has been added at his behest. The cardinal is accused of whispering in the king's ear and breathing into his face; since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch. When he hears this he thinks, imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor's head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe anything; putting it out there, to the shepherds on the hills, to Tyndale's plowboy, to the beggar on the roads and the patient beast in its byre or stall; out there to the bitter winter winds, and to the weak early sun, and the snowdrops in the London gardens. — Hilary Mantel

92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death. — Hilary Mantel

You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

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

Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus! — Hilary Mantel

Those who are made can be unmade. — Hilary Mantel

For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry — Hilary Mantel

The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then to go into the kitchen and make extravagant efforts, and say, "I have fed a patriot!". — Hilary Mantel

Young Surrey now lays down his knife and begins to complain. Noblemen, he laments, are not respected as they were in the days when England was great. The present king keeps about himself a collection of men of base degree, and no good will come of it. Cranmer creeps forward in his chair, as if to intervene, but Surrey gives him a glare that says, you're exactly who I mean, archbishop. — Hilary Mantel

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories. — Hilary Mantel

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

If the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. The monarchy 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. There is so much else in the world that is more interesting. — Hilary Mantel

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

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do. — Hilary Mantel

I went back to the door of Georges's study and pushed it open. He and Camille were sitting at either side of the empty fireplace, not speaking, just staring into each other's faces.
"Am I interrupting you?"
"No," Camille said, "we were just staring into each other's faces. I hope you weren't discomfitted by what you heard when you were listening at the door just now? — Hilary Mantel

Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it. — Hilary Mantel

My first two novels were very black comedies. — Hilary Mantel

He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world. — Hilary Mantel

Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

Henry says. He mimes a javelin throw: though in the restrained way — Hilary Mantel

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried. — Hilary Mantel

Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushrooms
in the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter.
Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don't defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.
They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious ...
Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me. — Hilary Mantel

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old. — Hilary Mantel

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets. — Hilary Mantel

Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don't use foreign expressions. It's elitist.) — Hilary Mantel

Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within - little chance. Even after childbearing, there is blood in your veins, not milk. — Hilary Mantel

He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terra-cotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people's saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no farther. — Hilary Mantel

Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition. — Hilary Mantel

I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen. — Hilary Mantel

When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity. — Hilary Mantel

Life's going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it's going to change now.
Everything you disapprove of you'll call "aristocratic." This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.
If "Liberty" was the watchword of the first Revolution, "Equality" is that of the second. "Fraternity" is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may. — Hilary Mantel

Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. — Hilary Mantel

I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out all the background details and the biographies of the people involved there, and I try to run up all the accounts side by side to see where the contradictions are, and to look where things have gone missing. — Hilary Mantel

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines. — Hilary Mantel

Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all. — Hilary Mantel

Men will tell you that they are so in love with you that it is making them ill. They will say they have stopped eating and sleeping. They say that they fear unless they can have you they will die. Then, the moment you given, they get up and walk away and lose all interest. The next week they will pass you by as if they don't know you. — Hilary Mantel

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort. — Hilary Mantel

crenellations, the scarlet and the pale, the airy stone and the — Hilary Mantel

He would rather know what's outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is. - Thomas Cromwell - Wolf Hall — Hilary Mantel

When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge. — Hilary Mantel

Some debts should never be tallied, he says. I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe. — Hilary Mantel

When I was a child, there was very little money, so I've always been concerned for my financial security, which has meant that finding myself as a writer was a bad move. The practical difference the money has made is that I can support myself by fiction. That is what I have been trying to do throughout my life. — Hilary Mantel

he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit. — Hilary Mantel

He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model. — Hilary Mantel

His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything. — Hilary Mantel

There are liasons which would put yours in the shade ... — Hilary Mantel

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line. — Hilary Mantel

You can't get away from dire health, but you may as well get some use out of it. It is not a question of making sense of suffering, because nothing does make sense of it. It is a question of not ... sinking into it. It is talking back to whatever hurts, whether that is physical or psychological, so that it doesn't submerge you. — Hilary Mantel

Men say," Liz reaches for her scissors, "'I can't endure it when women cry'
just as people say, 'I can't endure this wet weather.' As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen. — Hilary Mantel

But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully - in poured Citizen Danton and his crew. — Hilary Mantel

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

Be reasonable, my lord. Once you.ve done it, you'll want to do it all the time. For about three years. That's the way it goes. And your father has other work in mind for you.
pg.480 — Hilary Mantel

So this morning
waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night
he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. — Hilary Mantel

Come to that, don't pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up? — Hilary Mantel

His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed. — Hilary Mantel

But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys. — Hilary Mantel

Give me a book," she said. "A book of sermons, anything."
"What do you want a book for?"
"I want words. I've got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose. — Hilary Mantel

Every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time. — Hilary Mantel

Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.
One can learn from that, he thinks. — Hilary Mantel

Because Islam doesn't, he said, his voice toneless, — Hilary Mantel

There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process. — Hilary Mantel

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

It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as 'the career women's disease'. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it — Hilary Mantel

Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase — Hilary Mantel

I felt a wish to be fictionalized. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves. — Hilary Mantel

Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money. — Hilary Mantel

I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women. — Hilary Mantel

With France as she is, poor and unarmed, war means defeat. Defeat means either a military dictator who will salvage what he can and set up a new tyranny, or it means a total collapse and the return of absolute monarchy. It could mean both, one after the other. After ten years not a single one of our achievements will remain, and to your son liberty will be an old man's daydream. This is what will happen, Danton. No one can sincerely maintain the contrary. So if they do maintain it, they are not sincere, they are not patriots and their war policy is a conspiracy against the people. — Hilary Mantel

CAMILLE DESMOULINS: For the establishment of liberty and the safety of the nation, one day of anarchy will do more than ten years of National Assemblies. — Hilary Mantel

The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face. — Hilary Mantel

distraught. It seems he claims — Hilary Mantel