Hilary Mantel Quotes

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

Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child's. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I hate to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves, she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her...and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace...she has nothing...she expects nothing...' A tear at last sneaks from Henry's eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard. ~ Hilary Mantel

Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit. ~ Hilary Mantel

I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better. ~ Hilary Mantel

I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased - it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe's heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton. ~ Hilary Mantel

That's what we want, he thinks: help in prosperity. . . We never know how to take it when our life begins to be charmed. ~ 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

Truth isn't pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn't make pretty people. Truth isn't elegant; that's just mathematicians' sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind ~ Hilary Mantel

She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey. ~ 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

He, Cromwell, says to his visitors, just tell them this, and tell them loud: to each monk, one bed: to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them? ~ Hilary Mantel

Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say. It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques; these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself. ~ Hilary Mantel

That's the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn't have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it. ~ Hilary Mantel

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. 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! ~ Hilary Mantel

Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them , peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls. ~ Hilary Mantel

We are all dying, just at different speeds. ~ Hilary Mantel

You once told me, when you visited my house, how Anne conducts herself with men: she says, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, no."' Wyatt nods; he recognises those words; he looks sorry he spoke them. 'Now you may have to transpose one word of that testimony. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes. ~ Hilary Mantel

in case the dead ones rolled in late. ~ Hilary Mantel

My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?" "Ah," the cardinal says, entering into the problem. "To her face, 'my lady. ~ Hilary Mantel

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

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

No rational man could worship a God so simply vengeful ~ Hilary Mantel

The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain - the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? ~ Hilary Mantel

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

Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a circular pattern. It was worn most lavishly on the day of a woman's debut, when she was obliged to simulate the flush of the contrived orgasm bestowed by royal favour. ~ Hilary Mantel

I picked up a snake once. In Italy."
"Why did you do that?"
"For a bet."
"Was it poisonous?"
"We didn't know. That was the point of the bet."
"Did it bite you?"
"Of course."
"Why of course?"
"It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid? ~ 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

When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered. ~ Hilary Mantel

Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed?
Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, one you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand. ~ Hilary Mantel

The king's council, and obliged him, Thomas Cromwell, by ~ Hilary Mantel

Well, you know the form,' Bedingfield says. 'She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on 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

peroration. He had left his opponents with nothing to say and nowhere to ~ 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

Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties. ~ Hilary Mantel

Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

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

The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

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

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

England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist. ~ 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

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

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

He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her. ~ Hilary Mantel

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. ~ Hilary Mantel

When you become a great man, you meet kinsfolk you never knew you had. ~ Hilary Mantel

The king believes that even if he were not king, he would still be a great man. This is because God likes him. He needs to be liked and he needs to be right. But above all he needs to be listened to, with very close attention. Never enter a contest of wills with the king. Do not flatter him. Instead, give him something he can take credit for. Ask him questions to which you know the answers. Do not ask him the other sort of question. ~ 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

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

I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out. I say to myself, it's just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery; growths and tumour seem always to be described as "the size of a plum" or "the size of a grapefruit". ~ Hilary Mantel

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

I begin to understand you." She nods. "The blacksmith makes his own tools. ~ Hilary Mantel

Has it ever occurred to you that Max feels the same basic contempt for you as you do for him?"
"He feels contempt for me?"
"It is something he feels very readily."
"No, I hadn't thought that."
"Well, the whole world isn't driven by your appetites, and people who are not feel themselves your superior, naturally. He struggles very hard to make allowances for you. He is not tolerant, but he is charitable. Or perhaps it is the other way around."
"One becomes tired of analyzing his character," Danton said. "As if one's life depended on it. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

Even when she said her last words, asking the people to pray for the king, she was looking over the head of the crowd. Still, she did not let hope weaken her. Few women are so resolute at the last, and not many men. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

Once, in Thessaly, there was a poet called Simonides. He was commissioned to appear at a banquet, given by a man called Scopas, and recite a lyric in praise of his host. Poets have strange vagaries, and in his lyric Simonides incorporated verses in praise of Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. Scopas was sulky, and said he would pay only half the fee: 'As for the rest, get it from the Twins.' A little later, a servant came into the hall. He whispered to Simonides; there were two young men outside, asking for him by name. He rose and left the banqueting hall. He looked around for the two young men, but he could see no one. As he turned back, to go and finish his dinner, he heard a terrible noise, of stone splitting and crumbling. He heard the cries of the dying, as the roof of the hall collapsed. Of all the diners, he was the only one left alive. The bodies were so broken and disfigured that the relatives of the dead could not identify them. But Simonides was a remarkable man. Whatever he saw was imprinted on his mind. He led each of the relatives through the ruins; and pointing to the crushed remains, he said, there is your man. In linking the dead to their names, he worked from the seating plan in his head.
It is Cicero who tells us this story. He tells us how, on that day, Simonides invented the art of memory. He remembered the names, the faces, some sour and bloated, some blithe, some bored. He remembered exactly where everyone was sitting, at the moment the roof f ~ Hilary Mantel

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

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. ~ Hilary Mantel

Occam's Razor shaves you closer. ~ 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

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

Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d'Anton's temples. "Put your fingers here," he said. "Feel the resonance. Put them here, and here." He jabbed at d'Anton's face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. "I'll teach you like an actor," he said. "This city is our stage."
Camille said: "Book of Ezekiel. 'This city is the cauldron, and we the flesh' ..."
Fabre turned. "This stutter," he said. "You don't have to do it." Camille put his hands over his eyes. "Leave me alone," he said. "Even you." Fabre's face was incandescent. "Even you, I am going to teach." He leapt forward, wrenched Camille upright in his chair. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. "You're going to talk properly," Fabre said. "Even if it kills one of us." Camille put his hands protectively over his head. Fabre continued to perpetrate violence; d'Anton was too tired to intervene. ~ Hilary Mantel

Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up. ~ Hilary Mantel

He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. ~ 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

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. ~ 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

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers. ~ Hilary Mantel

Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent? ~ Hilary Mantel

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest. ~ Hilary Mantel

Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour. ~ Hilary Mantel

Martyr More,' he says. 'The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel? ~ Hilary Mantel

It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king's eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly, its force absorbed by a body securely armoured, moving in the right direction, moving at the right speed. His colour does not alter. His voice does not shake.
"Healthy?" he says. "Then I thank God for his favour to us. As I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence."
He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all have.
The king walks away towards his own rooms. Says over his shoulder, "Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts. ~ Hilary Mantel

I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said. ~ 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

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

My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on. ~ Hilary Mantel

The Republic is six months old, and it's flying apart. It has no cohesive force - only a monarchy has that. Surely you can see? We need the monarchy to pull the country together - then we can win the war."
Danton shook his head.
"Winners make money," Dumouriez said. "I thought you went where the pickings were richest?"
"I shall maintain the Republic," Danton said.
"Why?"
"Because it is the only honest thing there is."
"Honest? With your people in it?"
"It may be that all its parts are corrupted, vicious, but take it altogether, yes, the Republic is an honest endeavor. Yes, it has me, it has Fabre, it has Hebert - but it also has Camille. Camille would have died for it in '89."
"In '89, Camille had no stake in life. Ask him now - now he's got money and power, now he's famous. Ask him now if he's willing to die."
"It has Robespierre."
"Oh yes - Robespierre would die to get away from the carpenter's daughter, I don't doubt. ~ Hilary Mantel

Those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand. ~ Hilary Mantel

Once the queen's head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning's circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses, who have knelt for the passing of the soul, stand up and put on their hats. Under the hats, their faces are stunned. ~ 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

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

Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due. ~ Hilary Mantel

He looks at Norris, exasperated. He seems to think that with eloquence, with sincerity, with frankness, he can change what is happening. The whole court has seen him slobbering over the queen. How could he expect to go shopping with his eyes, and finger the goods no doubt, and not have an account to settle at the end of it? ~ Hilary Mantel

The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. ~ Hilary Mantel

People said - though this felt like a heresy - that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh. ~ Hilary Mantel

Richard goes with a bob of the head but without another word. It seems he interprets 'don't tell anybody' as 'don't tell anybody but Rafe', because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, and stands looking at him, with his eyebrows raised. Red-headed people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren't really there. ~ Hilary Mantel

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

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