Hilary Mantel Quotes

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.

Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.

The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for ‘Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.’ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

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.

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.

He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, 'You prick.

Where is Richard, do you know?"
"Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody?

Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit - bugger about with it, as Hébert would say.

I do no damage. This is damage, this.”
He picked up a paper from Camille’s desk. “I can’t read your writing, but I take it the general tenor is that Brissot should go and hang himself.

But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully - in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.

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!”.

May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into “permanent session” - what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term!

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

I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.

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.