Penelope Lively quotes

Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present. (Penelope Lively)
We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance.
Penelope Lively
Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are.
Penelope Lively
The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard.
Penelope Lively
It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.
Penelope Lively
We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from.
Penelope Lively
I'm intrigued by the way in which physical appearance can often direct a person's life; things happen differently for a beautiful woman than for a plain one.
Penelope Lively
Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.
Penelope Lively
The consideration of change over the century is about loss, though I think that social change is gain rather than loss.
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; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
Penelope Lively
All I know for certain is that reading is of the most intense importance to me; if I were not able to read, to revisit old favorites and experiment with names new to me, I would be starved - probably too starved to go on writing myself. (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.
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.
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.
Penelope Lively
It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency.
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.
Penelope Lively
I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children.
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.
Penelope Lively
There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history.
Penelope Lively
Language tethers us to the world without it we spin like atoms.
Penelope Lively
I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation. (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.
Penelope Lively
You learn a lot, writing fiction.
Penelope Lively
We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible.
Penelope Lively
I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Penelope Lively