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

[Margaret Thatcher] admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

It was unfortunate for other women who might come after [Margaret Thatcher] that the first woman to become prime minister was a male impersonator.