Quotes by Hilary Mantel

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

I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No hes not, my mother said.

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, its like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time youre thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

How many men can say, as I must, I am a man whose only friend is the King of England? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.

You know what its like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a mans leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.

... every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out Glory be and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. Hed go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog.

Every time you go to see Hamlet you dont expect it to have a happy ending...youre still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)

... those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.

If Marys blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.

He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, Gregory, what should I do about the great worm? Send a commission against it, sir, the boy says. It must be put down. He gives his son a long look. You do know its Arthur Cobblers tales? Gregory gives him a long look back. Yes, I do know. He sounds regretful. But it makes people so happy when I believe them.

But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...The king says, You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.I dont want him to be Achilles, he says, I only want him not to be flattened.

He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if hes pleasuring himself.

He finds he cannot think of the dying men at all. Into his mind instead strays the picture of More on the scaffold, seen through the veil of rain: his body, already dead, folding back neatly from the impact of the axe. The cardinal when he fell had no persecutor more relentless than Thomas More. Yet, he thinks, I did not hate him. I exercised my skills to the utmost to persuade him to reconcile with the king. And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404

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

As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuketo these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

He knows different now. Its the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasnt enough for him to take Bilneys life away; he had to take his death too.