You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

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

[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?