Hilary Mantel Quotes

To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.

I respected [Margaret Thatcher] enormously. She had great integrity in that respect.

I cherish the accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher and will always count her as one of my role models.

What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.

Anyone who supposed that when Margaret Thatcher left Number Ten she was going to take a Trappist vow did not know that formidable politician.

People forget I go to work. They forget that the Coleridge house was bought and paid for by the daughter of a travel agent and a barmaid from what the actor Richard Burton once described as the nightmarish 'featureless suburb' of Croydon.

When I was in politics, I always got accused of image-making and trying to make them something they weren't. Truth was - and nobody ever discovered it, although I was in that business for twenty years - what I was trying to do was to get them to be themselves.

After Margaret Thatcher's funeral, I spoke at a tribute meeting organised by her supporters in a pub next to St Paul's.

He used humor more effectively than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was not an especially warm person, but he appeared to be. Many people disliked his policies, but almost no one disliked him.

Thatcher was the best politician I have ever witnessed.

Scotland never voted for Margaret Thatcher.

Politics is a lot like acting. You have to be on all the time.

If you're dealing with a powerful leader, you're inevitably going to have a dialogue with her political past. It was always my intention to interrogate Thatcher's political life.

David Cameron is no Margaret Thatcher.

When I was asked to read a screenplay about Margaret Thatcher, I think I felt immediate apprehension.

My mother was from a middle-class background.

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

A second-class mind dealing with third-class material is hardly a necessity of life.

I think the working-class part of me comes out. Sometimes the people who have the loudest mouths are upper-class, upper-middle-class. The quietest are often working-class people, people who are broke. There is a fear of losing whatever it is that you have. I come from that background.

Like all of us, there were many facets to Margaret Thatcher's personality. In private she was kind, thoughtful, charming. Very attentive to her interlocutors. She took time to be concerned - she knew all about my children and wife Mila and so on.

I suppose I ought to think up some dramatic, quotable phrase for Public Information and the history books, but I'm damned if any of them come to mind. Besides, admitting the truth wouldn't sound too good. The truth, Russell, is that now the moment's here, I'm scared shitless. Somehow I don't think even Public Information could turn that into good copy.

The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.

For Henry James, class was 'the essentially hierarchial plan of English society' which was 'the great and ever-present fact to the mind of a stranger; there is hardly a detail of life that does not in some degree betray it'.

In the Communist period, the revolutionaries, the leaders were almost always - Che Guevara, people like that - they were always from the middle class and the educated. And empathy is a very powerful emotion.

I have all the equipment to be a politician. Total shamelessness.