109+ Hilary Mantel Quotes On Writing, History And Death

Hilary Mantel is a British novelist, short story writer and critic. She is best known for her historical novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2009 and 2012 respectively. Her other works include A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black and Giving Up the Ghost. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Hilary Mantel on writing, history, death.

Top 10 Hilary Mantel Quotes

1. Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
2. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.
3. 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.
4. [Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.
5. To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.
6. Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
7. 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.
8. Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
9. God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.
10. People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

Hilary Mantel Short Quotes

• The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
• There is so much else in the world that is more interesting [ than monarchy].
• When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
• [Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.
• In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.
• For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.
• By the tits of Holy Agnes
• Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
• I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.
• I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

Hilary Mantel Quotes About Writing

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. — Hilary Mantel

My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre. — Hilary Mantel

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world. — Hilary Mantel

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career. — Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel Quotes About History

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. — Hilary Mantel

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative. — Hilary Mantel

I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative. — Hilary Mantel

Beneath every history, another history. — Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Hilary Mantel

You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts. — Hilary Mantel

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws. — Hilary Mantel

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice. — Hilary Mantel

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. — 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

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. — Hilary Mantel

Every leader operates under the threat of assassination. — Hilary Mantel

In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me. — Hilary Mantel

If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469 — Hilary Mantel

Those who are made can be unmade. — Hilary Mantel

It was a very funny conference. I knew [Christopher Hitchens] before that. He had always been a good angel to me. He once stole a phrase from me that came out of his mouth on television. I saw his eyes move sideways. I thought, It's alright, you can have it! The conference was light on women. Salman Rushdie showed up, they were doing their own thing. I didn't feel neglected! — Hilary Mantel

To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature. — Hilary Mantel

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

For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. And then when you move on to the level of what historians said, laying the interpretations side by side. You also have to look back at the documents and make your own judgments. What the record says and what people say about it. A novelist can fill the gaps in a way that a biographer cannot. — Hilary Mantel

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

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

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before. — Hilary Mantel

I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes. — Hilary Mantel

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. — Hilary Mantel

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? — Hilary Mantel

I will get into trouble, I am sure, because since my Kate Middleton speech and before, certain papers were after me. I am not saying, however, that it would have been moral or right to assassinate Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher, but I know it will be read that way. I know it will cause a problem. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator. — Hilary Mantel

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

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

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

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. — Hilary Mantel

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. — Hilary Mantel

[Margaret Thatcher] said there was no thing such as society. This is what I find so interesting psychologically. Where did she come from? She had no mother. Her father came from a very identifiable background: religious, highly conformist. — Hilary Mantel

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

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

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire. — Hilary Mantel

It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set. — Hilary Mantel

It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow. — Hilary Mantel

[Margaret Thatcher] assumed somehow that this would get the woman voter and all those juvenile male voters who wanted a well-regulated household with a woman who knew what she should be doing. — Hilary Mantel

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear. — Hilary Mantel

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

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. — Hilary Mantel

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian. — Hilary Mantel

The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of... It's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really, really mess up your life. — 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

And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy? — Hilary Mantel

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur. — Hilary Mantel

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

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. — Hilary Mantel

When I began to read as an adult, my first big enthusiasm was Evelyn Waugh. I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. — Hilary Mantel

The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is. — Hilary Mantel

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

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. — Hilary Mantel

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap. — Hilary Mantel

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful. — Hilary Mantel

[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me. — Hilary Mantel

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." — Hilary Mantel

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

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

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. — Hilary Mantel

You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it. — Hilary Mantel

[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with. — Hilary Mantel

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. — 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 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

[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

I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did. — Hilary Mantel

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. — Hilary Mantel

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells. — Hilary Mantel

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming. — Hilary Mantel

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

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. — 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

Life Lessons by Hilary Mantel

1. Hilary Mantel's work teaches us to be resilient in the face of adversity and to never give up on our dreams.
2. She also shows us the importance of understanding our own history and the value of being able to tell stories that reflect our own experiences.
3. Finally, her writing reminds us of the power of words to create change and to inspire others.