Penelope Lively Quotes
"The Photograph is concerned with the power that the past has to interfere with the present: the time bomb in the cupboard."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Power, Time, Past)
"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
(Related: Fiction, Pleasure, Writing)
"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
(Related: Time, Fiction, Past, Present)
"There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: History, Interest, Memory)
"We read Greek and Norse mythology until it came out of our ears. And the Bible."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Bible, Mythology)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Want, Writers)
"We make choices but are constantly foiled by happenstance."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Choices)
"We all need a past - that's where our sense of identity comes from."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Identity, Past, Sense)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Family, Home, Country, First, Years)
"You learn a lot, writing fiction."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction, Writing)
"Getting to know someone else involves curiosity about where they have come from, who they are."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Curiosity)
"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
(Related: Children, Feeling, Interest, Literature)
"Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Climate)
"Equally, we require a collective past - hence the endless reinterpretations of history, frequently to suit the perceptions of the present."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: History, Past, Perceptions, Present)
"Deep down I have this atavistic feeling that really I should be in the country."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Country, Deep, Feeling)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
"I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Character, Occupation)
"I didn't think I had anything particular to say, but I thought I might have something to say to children."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Thought, Children)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Change, Society, London)
"I didn't write anything until I was well over 30."
- 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
(Related: Importance, Names, Old, Reading, Writing)
"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."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: History, English)
"I rather like getting away from fiction."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Fiction)
"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
(Related: Life, Appearance, Woman)
"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
(Related: Change, Life)
"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
(Related: Past)
"I'm now an agnostic but I grew up on the King James version, which I'm eternally grateful for."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Now)
"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
(Related: Fiction, May, Writing)
"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
(Related: Memory)
"It seems to me that everything that happens to us is a disconcerting mix of choice and contingency."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Choice)
"I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Want)