Hilary Mantel quotes

Hilary Mantel was an English writer renowned for her historical fiction, particularly the Wolf Hall trilogy about Thomas Cromwell. Her work earned numerous prestigious awards and brought renewed attention to Tudor England in contemporary literature. She inspired readers and writers worldwide with her meticulous research and distinctive narrative voice. Here are 65 of her quotes:

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.

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

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

Hilary Mantel

Fortitude.... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

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

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

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.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

Those who are made can be unmade.

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.

Hilary Mantel

It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

Hilary Mantel

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Hilary Mantel

So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

Hilary Mantel

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

Hilary Mantel

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

Hilary Mantel