Quotes from Hilary Mantel

For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

You will see that it is not in your interests to protect the gentlemen who share your sin. Because if the position were reversed, believe me, they would not spare a thought for you.

I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if only you can see it.

I could have told him what I wanted, and threatened him. But I encouraged him; I did it so that he would be complicit.

Without their regular feasts, the faithful are unstrung from the calendar, awash in a sea of days that are all the same.

Here's a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don't take him to a brothel.

que el rey les otorgará la merced de muerte por el hacha, que no aumentará su deshonra; aunque entre los jurados se murmura que a Smeaton se le ahorcará porque, al ser hombre de bajo nacimiento, no hay ningún honor que proteger.

A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

He gives himself a glass of wine, and another to Wyatt; says, 'Gardiner has people outside the gate, watching who comes and goes. This is a city house, it is not a fortress – but if anybody's here who shouldn't be, my household does enjoy kicking them out. We quite like fighting. I'd prefer to put my past behind me, but I'm not allowed to. Uncle Norfolk keeps reminding me I was a common soldier, and not even in his army.

he and the cardinal agree it would be better if Luther had never been born, or better if he had been born more subtle.

It is not so much who is guilty, as whose guilt is of service to you. . . we are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use.

how to retell exactly what had been said and done, without putting your own interpretation on it, and submit it to another judgement? It wasn't possible.

There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause. . .

The Cromwells – father, son and nephew – are of an ancient breed too. Were we not all conceived in Eden? When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman? When the Cromwells stroll out this week, the gentlemen of England get out of their way.

In Antwerp they slide the printed sheets of the gospels between the folds of bales of cloth, where they hide, white against white. Warm, nestled, God whispers within each bundle; His word sails the sea, is unloaded in eastern ports, travels to London in a cart.

People confuse early rising with moral worth;

As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this.

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?