Top 100 Hilary Mantel Quotes
#1. One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist.
Hanya Yanagihara
#2. The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.
Mal Peet
#3. But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.
[Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]
Hilary Mantel
#4. I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker.
Hillary Clinton
#5. Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall,' which blew the top of my head straight off. I've read it three times, and I'm still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#6. What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?"
- "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough."
- Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel
#7. If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a better researcher and knows more what she's about than I do.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#8. In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there's no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.
Lynne Truss
#9. Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all.
Hilary Mantel
#10. He feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme ...
Hilary Mantel
#11. This revolution - will it be a living?'
'We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.'
'Is that usual?'
'Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.
Hilary Mantel
#12. I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
Hilary Mantel
#13. Every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Hilary Mantel
#14. Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.
Hilary Mantel
#15. Henry glares at him. "I will say this for you. You stick by your man." "I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness. Why would I not?
Hilary Mantel
#16. To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king's whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn't, and I am dead.
Hilary Mantel
#17. There was a man called Chaumette, scruffy and sharp-featured. He hated the aristocrats and he also hated prostitutes, and the two things used to get quite confused in his mind.
Hilary Mantel
#19. Her hands were large and knuckley and calloused, made to hold a rifle, not a needle.
Hilary Mantel
#20. 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
#21. It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
Hilary Mantel
#23. But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.
Hilary Mantel
#24. Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife. When they have listened
Hilary Mantel
#25. Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in '91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me." He shook his head. "This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can't carry his country on the soles of his shoes.
Hilary Mantel
#26. Already d'Anton did not believe this. He recognized it as a disclaimer that Camille would issue from time to time in the hope of disguising the fact that he was an inveterate hell-raiser.
Hilary Mantel
#27. 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
#29. God knows," Charpentier said, "I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours."
"Reform?" Camille said. "I'm not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer.
Hilary Mantel
#30. If you come into a room and say, this is what we're not talking about, it follows that you're talking about nothing else.
Hilary Mantel
#31. I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.
Hilary Mantel
#32. So now get up.'
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Hilary Mantel
#33. In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: "I'll slaughter you!" "First," says the deputy, "have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.
Hilary Mantel
#34. I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.
Hilary Mantel
#35. She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don't want your dinner.
Hilary Mantel
#36. If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.
Hilary Mantel
#37. You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged somewhere, he will batter down your door, walks in and wipes his boots on you.
Hilary Mantel
#38. Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs.
Hilary Mantel
#39. So much has been said between them that is is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.
Hilary Mantel
#40. A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.
Hilary Mantel
#41. I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
Hilary Mantel
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an engine for torture.
Hilary Mantel
#45. Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.
Hilary Mantel
#46. 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
#47. The prose," Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.
Hilary Mantel
#48. I felt," he said, "irritated. It seemed a waste, I suppose. To come so far. To cross the sea. To die for ... " He shrugs. "God knows why.
Hilary Mantel
#49. A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.
Hilary Mantel
#50. History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
Hilary Mantel
#51. Never mind." He thinks, "tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.
Hilary Mantel
#52. I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.
Hilary Mantel
#53. Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Hilary Mantel
#54. Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth," he says, "set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be.
Hilary Mantel
#55. He cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ.
Hilary Mantel
#56. But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully - in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.
Hilary Mantel
#57. 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
#58. For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
Hilary Mantel
#59. 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
#60. So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
Hilary Mantel
#61. All colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge.
Hilary Mantel
#62. My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash.
Hilary Mantel
#63. 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
#64. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor.
Hilary Mantel
#65. He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.
Hilary Mantel
#66. 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.
Hilary Mantel
#67. If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems.
Hilary Mantel
#68. He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.
Hilary Mantel
#69. The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face.
Hilary Mantel
#70. He, Cromwell, watches. They are not the same couple from day to day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch.
516
Hilary Mantel
#71. Henry stirs into life. 'Do I retain you for what is easy? Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.'
pg. 585
Hilary Mantel
#72. Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.
Hilary Mantel
#73. Vadier (on Danton): "We'll clean up the rest of them, and leave that great stuffed turbot till the end."
Danton (on Vadier): "Vadier? I'll eat his brains and use his skull to shit in.
Hilary Mantel
#74. 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
#75. You know he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the blame for his bad ones? When fortune turns against you, you will feel her lash: you always, he never.
One day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look up and see him thundering downhill.
pg. 495
Hilary Mantel
#76. I am willing, though, to tear up the timetable and take some new routes; and I know I shall find, at some unlikely terminus, a hand that is meant to rest in mine.
Hilary Mantel
#77. Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!
Hilary Mantel
#78. Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a ... person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.
Hilary Mantel
#79. 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
#80. I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
Hilary Mantel
#81. She turns her head away, but through the thin film of her veil he can see her skin glow. Because women will coax: tell me, just tell me something, tell me your thoughts; and this he has done.
Hilary Mantel
#82. I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.
Hilary Mantel
#83. The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.
Hilary Mantel
#84. My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me.
Hilary Mantel
#85. There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.
Hilary Mantel
#86. If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it.
Hilary Mantel
#87. Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?
Hilary Mantel
#88. The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them of of their clothes.
Hilary Mantel
#89. 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
#90. This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
Hilary Mantel
#91. You would save them. If you could."
"No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won't dispute it.
Hilary Mantel
#92. peroration. He had left his opponents with nothing to say and nowhere to
Hilary Mantel
#93. 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
#94. When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again
Hilary Mantel
#95. When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.
Hilary Mantel
#96. Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy.
Hilary Mantel
#98. Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.
Hilary Mantel
#100. And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?
Hilary Mantel
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