History Quotes by Hilary Mantel

I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

— Hilary Mantel

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

— Hilary Mantel

Beneath every history, another history.

— Hilary Mantel

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

— Hilary Mantel

“I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.”

— Hilary Mantel

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

— Hilary Mantel

I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.

— Hilary Mantel

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

— Hilary Mantel

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.

— Hilary Mantel

Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.

— Hilary Mantel

“History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past”

— Hilary Mantel

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.

— Hilary Mantel

People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.

— Hilary Mantel

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

— Hilary Mantel

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

— Hilary Mantel

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to…

— Hilary Mantel

“For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is…

— Hilary Mantel

My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms…

— Hilary Mantel

What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be…

— Hilary Mantel

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that,…

— Hilary Mantel

No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince…

— Hilary Mantel

“When you're writing historical fiction, you are always looking for the untold story. You're looking for what has been repressed politically, or…

— Hilary Mantel

“It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like…

— Hilary Mantel

“But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is…

— Hilary Mantel

I spend a great deal of time on research, on finding all the available accounts of a scene or incident, finding out…

— Hilary Mantel

“He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and…

— Hilary Mantel

“The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm,…

— Hilary Mantel

For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps…

— Hilary Mantel

When I came to write my Thomas Cromwell books, I moved onto the center ground of English history, but I was never…

— Hilary Mantel

“...and I sometimes think that the fading out of the individual personality is what one should desire, not the status of a…

— Hilary Mantel

“The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you…

— Hilary Mantel

“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is…

— Hilary Mantel

“Some say the Tudors transcend this history, bloody and demonic as it is: that they descend from Brutus through the line of…

— Hilary Mantel

The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth.

— Hilary Mantel

“Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.”

— Hilary Mantel

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of…

— Hilary Mantel

One of the frustrations of someone like Thomas Cromwell is that, before they step into the light of history, and become extremely…

— Hilary Mantel

“If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how…

— Hilary Mantel