Quotes from Hilary Mantel

When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.

Inside his copy of The Social Contract he keeps a letter from a young Picard, an enthusiast called Antoine Saint-Just: "I know you, Robespierre, as I know God, by your works." When he suffers, as he does increasingly, from a distressing tightness of the chest and shortness of breath, and when his eyes seem too tired to focus on the printed page, the thought of the letter urges the weak flesh to more Works.

One fear creates a dereliction, the offense brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing.

Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe.

When you're writing historical fiction, you are always looking for the untold story. You're looking for what has been repressed politically, or repressed psychologically. You are working in the crypt.

This is the best he can hope for, unless. There is always unless.

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

Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own?

He thinks, ten years I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it's not the thickness of paper. Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind. Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.

Straight is the line of Duty, Curved is the line of Beauty, Follow the straight line, thou shall see. The curved line ever follow thee.

His councillors caution, 'No haste, Majesty. As soon as you choose, you forfeit advantage. You can marry only once.' 'Can he?' Fitwilliam mutters. 'This is Henry we're talking about.

He had meant to write to Gregory and say, I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can marry her. He has not written this. In his present precarious situation, it would be about as useful as the letters Gregory used to write to him: Dear father, I hope you are well. I hope your dog is well. And now no more for lack of time.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.

The king is good to those who think him good.

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.)

It's not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb.

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

He would rather know what's outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is". - Thomas Cromwell - Wolf Hall

Suppose she denied him then but favored him some other time? Women are weak and easily conquered by flattery. Especially when men write verses to them, and there are some who sat that Wyatt writes better verses than me, though I am the King.

There's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash.

The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

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...