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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.

-Hilary Mantel

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One Of The Frustrations

Hilary Mantel

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

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.

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

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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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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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Procrastination

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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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

History Is A Set Of Skills Rather Than A Narrative.

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.

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

I Am Very Happy In Second-hand Bookshops; Would A Gardener Not Be Happy In A Garden?

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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.

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

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?

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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.

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

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

For Historians, Creative Writers Provide A Kind Of Pornography.

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

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

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

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.

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.

[margaret] Thatcher Could Fake Her Class Background, But She Couldn't Fake The Quality Of Her Mind.

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

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.

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.

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

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