A Quote by Hilary Mantel

What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. — © Hilary Mantel
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different.
We should quit using phrases like 'turning points' and 'tipping points.' There's been multiple turning points, multiple tipping points.
Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because 'What if?' is the big thing.
In real life turning points are sneaky. They pass by unlabeled and unheeded. Opportunities are missed, catastrophes unwittingly celebrated. Turning points are only uncovered later, by historians who seek to bring order to a lifetime of tangled moments.
What's interesting to me, is a moving someone through time; in a way, history is part of my landscape. And it fascinates me that history can be so easily reflected in what happens today.
I start with the history, and I ask myself, 'What are the great turning points? What are the big dramatic scenes that are essential to telling the story?'
Dance fascinates me, and it is perhaps the most enriching audio-visual realm for a musician. Film-making also fascinates me.
Peter Tertzakian's analysis of world oil is a fascinating reminder that history often foretells the major turning points of the future.
I mean, language fascinates me anyway, and different words have different energies and you can change the whole drive of a sentence.
Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.
I came to this project and 'Far from Heaven' from completely different vantage points. 'Heaven' was of course about the Douglas Sirk films of that period, with the very specific cinematic language and style of melodrama. With 'Carol,' it was presented to me already packaged, with Cate Blanchett attached and Phyllis Nagy's script complete - when it came to me it had a long history and pre-history.
Songwriting's a weird game. I never intended to become one - I fell into this by mistake, and I can't get out of it. It fascinates me. I like to point out the rawer points of life.
Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality.
There were various turning points, but the main one at the beginning was that I was going off to do another degree in the history of art. I would have ended up as some art historian at Sotheby's or something.
There is something about military history that fascinates me. You find that many battles have been lost by people with very good military background when they fought battles in a battleground they didn't understand. I have seen that in business, too. You have to look at a marketplace like a battle-ground.
Significant consequences can begin very inconsequentially. That's one thing that fascinates me. The other thing that fascinates me is how accident can undermine something that's unfolding, something that might have played out differently otherwise.
Otherwise the history just gets completely flattened out, and people imagine that everything was always available and accessible. One of the things that struck me was the way in which the landscape of experimental music seemed different at different points in time, on the basis of where one was situated geographically, if one had access to live performances, and what was released at a particular time.
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