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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

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If The Monarchy Were

Hilary Mantel

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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.

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[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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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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Procrastination

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Hindsight Is The Historian's Necessary Vice.

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.

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

History Is A Set Of Skills Rather Than A Narrative.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

For Historians, Creative Writers Provide A Kind Of Pornography.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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