But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. Furthermore, it is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the guessed-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.

— Hilary Mantel

But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and me, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.' But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ... The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.'' I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened.

— Hilary Mantel

By the hairy balls of Jesus

— Hilary Mantel

Cardinal Arpeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

— Hilary Mantel

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

— Hilary Mantel

Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

— Hilary Mantel

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

... every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

— Hilary Mantel

Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)

— Hilary Mantel

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. Furthermore, it’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. Furthermore, it is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. Furthermore, it is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. Furthermore, it’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

— Hilary Mantel