Penelope Lively Quotes
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss... view
By: Penelope Lively
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard... view
By: Penelope Lively
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters.. view
By: Penelope Lively
The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction... view
By: Penelope Lively
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history... view
By: Penelope Lively
We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible... view
By: Penelope Lively
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm... view
By: Penelope Lively
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance... view
By: Penelope Lively
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from... view
By: Penelope Lively
I have had to empty two family homes during the last few years - first, the house that had been my grandmother's since 1923, and then my own country home, which we had lived in for over twenty years... view
By: Penelope Lively
You learn a lot, writing fiction... view
By: Penelope Lively
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are... view
By: Penelope Lively
It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it... view
By: Penelope Lively
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going... view
By: Penelope Lively
Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present... view
By: Penelope Lively
Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country... view
By: Penelope Lively
Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story... view
By: Penelope Lively
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation... view
By: Penelope Lively
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children... view
By: Penelope Lively
I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not... view
By: Penelope Lively
I didn't write anything until I was well over 30... view
By: Penelope Lively
All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me.. view
By: Penelope Lively
I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement... view
By: Penelope Lively
I rather like getting away from fiction... view
By: Penelope Lively
I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life.. view
By: Penelope Lively
I'm not an historian and I'm not wanting to write about how I perceive the social change over the century as a historian, but as somebody who's walked through it and whose life has been dictated by it too, as all our lives are... view
By: Penelope Lively
I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past... view
By: Penelope Lively
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for... view
By: Penelope Lively
I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction... view
By: Penelope Lively
I've always been fascinated by the operation of memory - the way in which it is not linear but fragmented, and its ambivalence... view
By: Penelope Lively
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency... view
By: Penelope Lively
I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements... view
By: Penelope Lively