"Diplomacy is more than saying or doing the right things at the right time, it is avoiding saying or doing the wrong things at any time"

“Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.”

Source : "Bring Up the Bodies : A Review and Interview With Booker Prize-winning Author Hilary Mantel". Interview with Ilana Teitelbaum, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 9, 2012.

“Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.”

“Working hard and working smart sometimes can be two different things.”

“The New World Order is a more palatable name for the Anglo American world empire. It's the planetary domination of London, New York, Washington over the rest of the world. It's hard to get people to join that or think they have a part in it if you called it the Anglo American world empire. If you call it the New World Order, then people in India or some place like that or the European Union might think, "Well, there's something there for us too." But that's not what it is; it's the Anglo American New World Order.”

“I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.”

“Worship leader George Beverly Shea kidded Billy Graham that the latter would be unemployed in Heaven -- while Shea would still have a job leading worship.”

“The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.”

“When the deepest part of you becomes engaged in what you are doing...you are doing what you were meant to be doing.”