Hilary Mantel

All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there's not much difference between politics and sex; it's all aboutpower. He didn't suppose he was the first person in the world to make this observation. It's a question of seduction, and how fast and cheap you can effect it: if Camille, he thought, approximates to one of those little milliners who can't make ends meet - in other words, an absolute pushover - then Robespierre is a Carmelite, mind set on becoming Mother Superior. You can't corrupt her; you can wave your cock under her nose, and she's neither shocked nor interested: why should she be, when she hasn't the remotest ideawhat it's for?

The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for __ack off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter._ He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d__nton__ temples. __ut your fingers here,_ he said. __eel the resonance. Put them here, and here._ He jabbed at d__nton__ face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. ____l teach you like an actor,_ he said. __his city is our stage.__amille said: __ook of Ezekiel. __his city is the cauldron, and we the flesh_ ...__abre turned. __his stutter,_ he said. __ou don__ have to do it._ Camille put his hands over his eyes. __eave me alone,_ he said. __ven you._ Fabre__ face was incandescent. __ven you, I am going to teach._ He leapt forward, wrenched Camille upright in his chair. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. __ou__e going to talk properly,_ Fabre said. __ven if it kills one of us._ Camille put his hands protectively over his head. Fabre continued to perpetrate violence; d__nton was too tired to intervene.

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.

The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.

You know I'm not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king's servant.

Give me a book,_ she said. __ book of sermons, anything.___hat do you want a book for?___ want words. I__e got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose.

Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Those who are made can be unmade.

When men decided women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them were collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it.

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 organising our ignorance of the past. It__ the record of what__ left on the record. It__ the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It__ what__ left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it _ a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more __he past_ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. 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. It__ no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

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.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don't just stick there scowling at the problem. But don't make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient.", 25 February 2010]