Hilary Mantel
Read Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. Then do what it says, including the tasks you think are impossible. You will particularly hate the advice to write first thing in the morning, but if you can manage it, it might well be the best thing you ever do for yourself. This book is about becoming a writer from the inside out. Many later advice manuals derive from it. You don't really need any others, though if you want to boost your confidence, "how to" books seldom do any harm. You can kick-start a whole book with some little writing exercise.Collection: Morning
[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.Collection: Males
Those who are made can be unmade.Collection: Made
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.Collection: Daughter
I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Blow
[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.Collection: Talking
[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.Collection: Mother
[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Mean
History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.Collection: Skills
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.Collection: Mother
Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation.Collection: Firsts
[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!Collection: Daughter
My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.Collection: Fading
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.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Fashion
[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.Collection: Mother
I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.Collection: Hate
God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Hate
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.Collection: Writing
[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Facts
We have a number of very powerful women in the world now - Mrs. [Angela] Merkel, who the Germans call Mutti. What did we call Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher? When she was minister of education, she stopped the children's free school milk. This may sound quaint, but after the war we were such a malnourished nation that part of the founding of the welfare state were public health initiatives. Every little schoolchild got milk. Mrs. Thatcher stopped it. They called her "Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher."Collection: Powerful
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.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Generations
I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.Collection: Rivals
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.Collection: Children
It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.Collection: Males
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Home
In order to successfully impersonate men, the woman [Margaret Thatcher] launched a war.Collection: War
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.Collection: Responsibility
[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.Collection: Father
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.Collection: Travel
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Moving
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?Collection: Military
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.Collection: Kings
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.Collection: Writing
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.Collection: Novelists
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?Collection: Running
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.Collection: Roots
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.Collection: Memories
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: New Year
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.Collection: Book