Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.
[Margaret Thatcher] aroused such strong loathing in so many people. That's the fact that interests me.
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 think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
People will identify with a persecuted minority without asking themselves what they are identifying with.
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late.
My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.
[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties.
[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.
Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.
The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.
Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.
People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.
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.
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.
If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
[Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.
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.
It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.
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.
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.
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.
I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.
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.
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.
Imagine the consequences of having the first woman prime minister who is the milk snatcher. [Margaret Thatcher] takes away the nourishment of the nation.
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.
It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical.