Hilary Mantel Quotes

Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.

Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.

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

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?"A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, "At this moment, master, I would have to say...

He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.

Law of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny...); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet have no visible means of support; who have been refused certificates of citizenship by their Sections; who have been removed from public office by the Convention or its representatives; who belong to an aristocratic family, and have not given proof of constant and extraordinary revolutionary fervor; or who have emigrated.