Quotes from Hilary Mantel

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.

Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.

Those who think a heart cannot break have led blessed and sheltered lives.

Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.

I begin to understand you." She nods. "The blacksmith makes his own tools.

He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets.

No rational man could worship a God so simply vengeful

a grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream

Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.

The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.

The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

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 he's pleasuring himself.

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.

Do you know you can learn from pain?' But, he explains, the circumstances must be right. To learn, you must have a future:

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.

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!

Richard goes with a bob of the head but without another word. It seems he interprets 'don't tell anybody' as 'don't tell anybody but Rafe', because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, and stands looking at him, with his eyebrows raised. Red-headed people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren't really there.

So now get up.' Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.

By the tits of Holy Agnes

By the hairy balls of Jesus

You can't get away from dire health, but you may as well get some use out of it. It is not a question of making sense of suffering, because nothing does make sense of it. It is a question of not… sinking into it. It is talking back to whatever hurts, whether that is physical or psychological, so that it doesn't submerge you.

We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles.

Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them, peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls.

The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under glass