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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

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I Once Stole A

Hilary Mantel

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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.

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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.

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.

[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.

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.

I Think If The Monarchy Were Removed Tomorrow, It Wouldn't Have A Huge Effect On The National Mind-set.

Over The City Lies The Sweet, Rotting Odor Of Yesterday's Unrecollected Sins.

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.

A Statute Is Written To Entrap Meaning, A Poem To Escape It.

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."

[margaret Thatcher] Scorned And Despised Other Women, And Predicated Her Values Entirely On The Values Of Her Father, A Small Town Shopkeeper.

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.

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.

Beneath Every History, Another History.

Sometimes Peace Looks Like War, You Cannot Tell Them Apart.

Insight Cannot Be Taken Back. You Cannot Return To The Moment You Were In Before.

My First Career Ambitions Involved Turning Into A Boy; I Intended To Be Either A Railway Guard Or A Knight Errant.

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.

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.

I've Got So Many Ideas, And Sometimes The More Exhausted My Body Gets, The More Active My Mind Gets.

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.

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.

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.

If You Are Without Impulses, You Are, To A Degree, Without Joy..." 469

Those Who Are Made Can Be Unmade.

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.

Wolf Hall Attempts To Duplicate Not The Historian's Chronology But The Way Memory Works: In Leaps, Loops, Flashes.

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.

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I Do Myself Think That History Is A Set Of Skills Rather Than A Narrative.

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.

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.

She Is Very Plain. What Does Henry See In Her?'" "he Thinks She's Stupid. He Finds It Restful.

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.

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.

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.

A Novel Should Be A Book Of Questions, Not A Book Of Answers.

I Spend A Lot Of My Time Talking To The Dead, But Since I Get Paid For It, No One Thinks I'm Mad.

For What's The Point Of Breeding Children, If Each Generation Does Not Improve On What Went Before.

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.

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.

Historical Novels

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.

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.

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?

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Feminism Hasn't Failed, It's Just Never Been Tried.

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.

Imagination Only Comes When You Privilege The Subconscious, When You Make Delay And Procrastination Work For You.

Procrastination

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.

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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.

Florence And Milan Had Given Him Ideas More Flexible Than Those Of People Who'd Stayed At Home.

[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.

You're Only Young Once, They Say, But Doesn't It Go On For A Long Time? More Years Than You Can Bear.

Imagine The Consequences Of Having The First Woman Prime Minister Who Is The Milk Snatcher. [margaret Thatcher] Takes Away The Nourishment Of The Nation.

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.

Much Historical Fiction That Centers On Real People Has Always Been Deficient In Information, Lacking In Craft And Empty In Affect.

When People Begin To Talk About "our Island Story" My Hackles Rise. It Is Deluded And Conservative.

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.

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.

[margaret Thatcher] Aroused Such Strong Loathing In So Many People. That's The Fact That Interests Me.

I Am Usually Protective Of My Work, Not Showing It To Anyone Until It Has Been Redrafted And Polished.

For Many Imaginative Writers, Working For The Press Is A Fact Of Their Life. But It's Best Not To Like It Too Much.

I'm A Very Organised And Rational And Linear Thinker And You Have To Stop All That To Write A Novel.

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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.

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.

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I Only Became A Novelist Because I Thought I Had Missed My Chance To Become A Historian.

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.

Hindsight Is The Historian's Necessary Vice.

I Think It Took Me Half A Page Of 'wolf Hall' To Think: 'this Is The Novel I Should Have Been Writing All Along.'

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.

It Was Unfortunate For Other Women Who Might Come After [margaret Thatcher] That The First Woman To Become Prime Minister Was A Male Impersonator.

It Is Almost A Joke, But A Joke That Nobody Tells.

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.

'show Up At The Desk' Is One Of The First Rules Of Writing, But For 'wolf Hall' I Was About 30 Years Late.

He Thinks, I Remembered You, Thomas More, But You Didn't Remember Me. You Never Even Saw Me Coming.

By The Tits Of Holy Agnes

History Is A Set Of Skills Rather Than A Narrative.

People Who Wrote Literary Novels About The Past Probably Didn't Want Them Pegged As Historical Fiction. Certainly That Was True In England.

Memory Isn't A Theme; It's Part Of The Human Condition.

Human Condition

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.

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.

People Will Identify With A Persecuted Minority Without Asking Themselves What They Are Identifying With.

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.

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.

Like A Historian, I Interpret, Select, Discard, Shape, Simplify. Unlike A Historian, I Make Up People's Thoughts.

When I Came To Write My Thomas Cromwell Books, I Moved Onto The Center Ground Of English History, But I Was Never There Before. I Didn't Feel It Was My History Particularly, Coming From Northern Britain, Being Of Irish Extraction, Being A Cradle Catholic. The Image Of England I Grew Up With Felt Somewhere Else. There Was An Official England In Postcards, But It Wasn't One I Had Visited. But I Decided To March Onto The Center Ground And Occupy It Whether It Was Mine Or Not.

[margaret Thatcher] Was Always Talking About What The Prudent Housewife Should Do And What The Prudent Housewife Knew.

If You Get Stuck, Get Away From Your Desk. Take A Walk, Take A Bath, Go To Sleep, Make A Pie, Draw, Listen To Music, Meditate, Exercise; Whatever You Do, Don't Just Stick There Scowling At The Problem. But Don't Make Telephone Calls Or Go To A Party; If You Do, Other People's Words Will Pour In Where Your Lost Words Should Be.

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!

Fear Of Commitment Lies Behind The Fear Of Writing.

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.

I Think I Would Have Been A Reasonably Good Lawyer. I Have A Faculty For Making Sense Of Mountains Of Information.

When Narratives Fracture, When Words Fail, I Take Consolation From The Part Of My Life That Always Works: The Stationery Order. The Mail-order Stationery People Supply Every Need From Royal Blue Quink To A Dazzling Variety Of Portable Hard Drives.

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.

There Is So Much Else In The World That Is More Interesting [ Than Monarchy].

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.

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.

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."

Though I Have Never Thought Of Myself As A Book Collector, There Are Shelves In Our House Browsed So Often, On So Many Rainy Winter Nights, That The Contents Have Seeped Into Me As If By Osmosis.

I Would Have Been A Disaster As A Career Politician. I Would Never Have Toed A Party Line.

For Historians, Creative Writers Provide A Kind Of Pornography.

I Can't Think Of Any Male Politician Who Magnetizes Love And Hate - Mainly Hate - The Way [margaret Thatcher] Did.

[h]ope Takes You By The Throat Like A Stranger, It Makes Your Heart Leap.

[margaret Thatcher] Admitted To Being The Daughter Of Her Father But Not The Daughter Of Her Mother!

It Follows That If You Are Not A Mother You Are Not A Grandmother. Your Life Has Become Unpunctuated, Whereas The Lives Of Other Women Around You Have These Distinct Phases.

Lives Of Others

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.

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.

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.

God Takes Out Your Heart Of Flesh, And Gives You A Heart Of Stone.

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.

Insights Don't Usually Arrive At My Desk, But Go Into Notebooks When I'm On The Move. Or Half-asleep.

When You Have Committed Enough Words To Paper, You Feel You Have A Spine Stiff Enough To Stand Up In The Wind. But When You Stop Writing, You Find That's All You Are - A Spine, A Row Of Rattling Vertebrae, Dried Out Like An Old Quill Pen.

Like Every Writer, I'm Drawn By Unlikely Juxtapositions, Precisely-dated And Once-only Collisions Between People From Different Worlds.

I Loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That Book Gave Me Courage.

My Concern Is Less The Monarchy As Such Than The Attempt Of A Fading Colonial Power To Hang Onto Grandeur.

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.

I Am Not A Historian. I Don't See What I Do As Being A Rival To Biography.

It Is The Absence Of Facts That Frightens People: The Gap You Open, Into Which They Pour Their Fears, Fantasies, Desires.

In Order To Successfully Impersonate Men, The Woman [margaret Thatcher] Launched A War.

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.

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.

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.

Historical Novels

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.

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.

Some Of These Things Are True And Some Of Them Lies. But They Are All Good Stories.

The Worship Of Thomas More Goes Beyond Catholics.

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.

So Many Years Of Preparation, For What Was Called Adult Life: Was It For This?

[t]he Heart Is Like Any Other Organ, You Can Weigh It On A Scale.

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.

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.

Procrastination

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?

[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.

History Is Always Changing Behind Us, And The Past Changes A Little Every Time We Retell It.

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.

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.

Historical Novels

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.

As A Writer, You Owe It To Yourself Not To Get Stuck In A Rut Of Looking At The World In A Certain Way.

In My 20s I Was In Constant Pain From Undiagnosed Endometriosis. With No Prospect Of A Cure, I Decided I Needed A Career - Writing - That Could Accommodate Being Ill.

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.

I Am Sure That All Politicians Seek The Home Connection With The Voter. But [margaret Thatcher] Carried It To Extremes.

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.

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