Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 8

151. “And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.”

— Hilary Mantel

152. “As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404.”

— Hilary Mantel

153. “There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins.”

— Hilary Mantel

154. “When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. If your law exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it – on the rich as well as the poor, the people on the Scottish borders and the Welsh marches, the men of Cornwall as well as the men of Sussex and Kent.”

— Hilary Mantel

155. “I can’t divide Camille’s loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.”

— Hilary Mantel

156. “I’ve got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.”

— Hilary Mantel

157. “You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead.”

— Hilary Mantel

158. “This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.”

— Hilary Mantel

159. “She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don’t want your dinner.”

— Hilary Mantel

160. “Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbor as the Antichrist.”

— Hilary Mantel

161. “In truth you cannot separate them, your public being and your private self.”

— Hilary Mantel

162. “Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep.”

— Hilary Mantel

163. “Whereas we bless an old soldier and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth.”

— Hilary Mantel

164. “To gentle pressure, King Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God’s light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed, though not unsupervised. There will always.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

166. “Writing’s like running downhill; can’t stop if you want to.”

— Hilary Mantel

167. “Then I blame our diet. Englishmen were never made to eat fish. Salt water gets in your brain. A German can live on vegetables, he eats what he calls crowte. A Frenchman eats roots and herbs – if he’s famished you just turn him out to grass. But an Englishman is bred on bacon and beef.”

— Hilary Mantel

168. “Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.”

— Hilary Mantel

169. “Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.”

— Hilary Mantel

170. “The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them of of their clothes.”

— Hilary Mantel

171. “If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.”

— Hilary Mantel

172. “He did not relish the topic; he sensed in Jane Rochford’s tone the peculiar cruelty of women. They fight with the poor weapons God has bestowed – spite, guile, skill in deceit – and it is likely that in conversations between themselves they trespass in places where a man would never trust his footing.”

— Hilary Mantel

173. “For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.”

— Hilary Mantel

174. “It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.”

— Hilary Mantel

175. “The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.”

— Hilary Mantel

176. “When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.”

— Hilary Mantel

177. “Never mind.” He thinks, “tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.”

— Hilary Mantel

178. “Thomas More still has some credit with the king. And he has written him a letter, saying,” he manages to smile, “that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled together and tied up in string – one reformer stuffed inside another, as for a feast you might parcel a pheasant inside a chicken inside a goose.”

— Hilary Mantel

179. “I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.”

— Hilary Mantel

180. “He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.”

— Hilary Mantel

181. “He tries not to give offense. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It’s a living, he thinks; but it isn’t. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that’s what we’re going to have.”

— Hilary Mantel

182. “England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.”

— Hilary Mantel

183. “Let me unfold to you,” he says, “the way my thoughts proceed.”

— Hilary Mantel

184. “I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.”

— Hilary Mantel

185. “For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.”

— Hilary Mantel

186. “I felt a wish to be fictionalized.”

— Hilary Mantel

187. “He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.”

— Hilary Mantel

188. “They are en route to Farnham, a small hunting party, when a report is galloped along the road: cases of plague have appeared in the town. Henry, brave on the battlefield, pales almost before their eyes and wrenches around his horse’s head: where to? Anywhere will do, anywhere but Farnham.”

— Hilary Mantel

189. “But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they’re mine.”

— Hilary Mantel

190. “In Italy you learned cunning, but in Antwerp, flexibility. And besides, the shopping! Just step out of your door and you can get a diamond or a broom, you can get knives, candlesticks and keys, ironwork to suit the expert eye. They make soap and glass, they cure fish and they deal in alum and promissory notes. You can buy pepper and ginger, aniseed and cumin, saffron and rice, almonds and figs; you can buy vats and pots, combs and mirrors, cotton and silk, aloes and myrrh.”

— Hilary Mantel

191. “Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.”

— Hilary Mantel

192. “Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a circular pattern. It was worn most lavishly on the day of a woman’s debut, when she was obliged to simulate the flush of the contrived orgasm bestowed by royal favour.”

— Hilary Mantel

193. “I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I’m mad.”

— Hilary Mantel

194. “You mustn’t stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.”

— Hilary Mantel

195. “Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.”

— Hilary Mantel

196. “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 shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.”

— Hilary Mantel

197. “He glances up again, and recognizes Gregory’s design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

199. “These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. “Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,” remarks Sir Thomas More. “I mean, your idol Usury.” But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to get the day’s exchange rates.”

— Hilary Mantel

200. “He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn’t say which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. ‘All women,’ she says. ‘All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.”

— Hilary Mantel