Quotes by Hilary Mantel

About Hilary Mantel:

Dame Hilary Mary Mantel is an English writer whose work includes personal memoirs, short stories, and historical fiction.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Sion calls Anne an eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says, she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George? ‘Any brother she's got. Th...

Hilary Mantel

Where is Richard, do you know?" "Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody?

Hilary Mantel

By the hairy balls of Jesus

Hilary Mantel

A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and f...

Hilary Mantel

My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?

Hilary Mantel

Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends. How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places ...

Hilary Mantel

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,...

Hilary Mantel

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you c...

Hilary Mantel

Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say. It is the processions tha...

Hilary Mantel

The multitude," Cavendish says, "is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down--for the novelty of the thing.

Hilary Mantel

It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on. Pg.406

Hilary Mantel

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.

Hilary Mantel

In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and sha...

Hilary Mantel

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.

Hilary Mantel

Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

Hilary Mantel

I picked up a snake once. In Italy." "Why did you do that?" "For a bet." "Was it poisonous?" "We didn't know. That was the point of the bet." "Did it bite you?" "Of course." "Why of course?" "It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it do...

Hilary Mantel

This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.

Hilary Mantel

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than hose of people who'd stayed at home.

Hilary Mantel

Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

Hilary Mantel

For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much.

Hilary Mantel

She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.

Hilary Mantel

Author Bio

  • NameHilary Mantel
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • BornJuly 6, 1952
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Essayist
  • WorksWolf Hall; Bring Up The Bodies
  • AwardsCommander Of The Order Of The British Empire; Hawthornden Prize; Man Booker Prize; Man Booker Prize