Hilary Mantel Quotes

Truth is, I don't like movies that are only good once; I tend to dismiss them. I like movies that get better the more you watch them.

Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it - but there is.

The thing is that pictures are everywhere. The question is what we don't see, and why don't we see so much. I just see it.

There are the things that are out in the open, and there are the things that are hidden. The real world has more to do with what is hidden.

Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.

Even wars, big conflicts that have drawn a lot of news coverage, sometimes seem to me to have a center that hasn't been described, that might yet be glimpsed if approached from some odd angle.

The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.

There's always more to a story than a body can see from the fenceline.

The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.

To know all things is not permitted.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

That is how heavy a secret can become. It can make blood flow easier than ink.

Something lurked inside the truth.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?

All societies end up wearing masks.

If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they'd tell.

She opened her mouth but did not immediately speak, and I felt, simultaneously, the impulse to coax the words from her and the impulse to suppress them. I always thought I wanted to know a secret, or I wanted an event to unfold – I wanted my life to start – but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.

Learning from programmed information always hides reality behind a screen.

The filth under the white snow, the sunne discovers.

So far, I have been a spectator in this theater which is the world, but I am now about to mount the stage, and I come forward masked.

We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real...and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists. (295)