The king believes that even if he were not king, he would still be a great man. This is because God likes him. He needs to be liked and he needs to be right. But above all he needs to be listened to, with very close attention. Never enter a contest of wills with the king. Do not flatter him. Instead, give him something he can take credit for. Ask him questions to which you know the answers. Do not ask him the other sort of question.

— Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel Quotes

Rafe shrugs. ‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’ It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.

— Hilary Mantel

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.

— Hilary Mantel

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.

— Hilary Mantel

I have noticed,’ she says, ’common men often love their mothers. Sometimes they even love their wives.

— Hilary Mantel

If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another after that.

— Hilary Mantel

I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.

— Hilary Mantel

In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation.

— Hilary Mantel

It is prince’s tricks,’ he says. ‘Three days in a row Henry gives the French a private audience. Then he ignores them for a week.

— Hilary Mantel

This is what Henry does. He uses people up. He takes all they give him and more. When he is finished with them he is noisier and fatter and they are husks or corpses.

— Hilary Mantel

Wolsey always said, work out what people want, and you might be able to offer it; it is not always what you think, and may be cheap to supply.

— Hilary Mantel

I had read all the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion.

— Hilary Mantel

Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.

— Hilary Mantel

You have no right to assume that you’ll be able to write because you could write yesterday.

— Hilary Mantel

The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.

— Hilary Mantel

The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.

— Hilary Mantel

The feeling around his heart – that it is crushed, forced out of shape – he now understands as a deformity caused by grief.

— Hilary Mantel

The past changes a little every time we retell it.

— Hilary Mantel

He feels he is in the torture chamber but he knows that one day he will find the door out, because it is he who has the key.

— Hilary Mantel

Forgetting is an art like other arts. It needs dedication and practice.

— Hilary Mantel

You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

— Hilary Mantel
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