571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

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

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems.

His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.

He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.

For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)

Told me if I did not smell of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan.